Which is another thing.
It is hard enough to do lunch when you know a place. But when you are new, you have never seen anything so big as the lunchroom. There are secret maps, and you’d better not mess up. Which I did, of course. The first day, I sat at the popular table. As if I should know. First one perfect girl sat down, then another. They were making big eyes at one another, rattling their bracelets around, but nobody said anything. They just sat around me like white surrounding black until I got it. I said, “Excuse me,” and moved, and they all laughed together. It was kind of a pretty sound.
I sit mostly by myself, or by someone miscellaneous. I don’t talk. At first I tried, but nothing good ever came of it. I would see the person I’d talked to in the hall the next day and say hi and they would look at me like, What? So I just eat and that is the one good thing about this school, they have very good food. On Sloppy Joe day, I go back for seconds. I get them, too. The cafeteria ladies like me. They see what goes on. Kids think they stand back there with their big metal spoons and big aprons and just think, Oh I see the corn has gone down, I guess I’ll go on back and get some more. But when you look up you see that of course all the faces are different. And they are interested in you and friendly and a lot of them really care that you eat well. And they feel happy when you like things. They don’t usually give seconds, especially not to the boys, who are not sincere when they ask, who just want to use seconds for food fights. But they will give more to me. This is how far things have gone down, that my only friends in school are the cafeteria ladies. And not even really. They take breaks together, they sit at a table in the corner with some coffee and a little of this and a little of that, things we had for lunch. If I went up and sat with them, they wouldn’t like it either. I think in about a few months I will be sitting with someone real. It’s hard to tell. I have never had such a hard time getting my place in a school. You wish you could bring a book of directions to yourself that everyone would read. But no. You just have to wait until the time that a crack comes.
After lunch is history. This man who teaches it, Mr. Spurlock, is insane. Here is his idea of how to teach: Copy notes that you have written in your bent-up spiral notebook onto the blackboard. Tell the class to shut up about two hundred times. Write small and creepy so nobody can read it. Then tell your class to copy the notes from the board into their notebooks. While they do, sit at your desk and read the newspaper and pick at your side teeth with your little finger. Just before the bell rings, say, “Any questions?” I swear this is exactly true. Not one kid likes him. Plus his shoes are about five hundred years old. If he were mental, which his shoes look like, you would feel sorry for him. But he is not mental. He is just the worst teacher of all time in the history of the whole universe. Probably he is a made-up thing from a science experiment to find out: How much can kids take?
Next, French, and the teacher is so beautiful she could be Miss America. She wears French things like a scarf around her neck. She wears short-sleeved sweaters and long tight skirts and nice leather shoes that tie. She smells like good perfume. But her problem is that she never speaks English to us and sometimes we just need to know something. It is only beginning French. So what I want to know is where does she get off from the first day rattling on in French, French, French? One day I tried to complain. After class. I said, “Miss Worthington, I don’t think you should talk only in French.” And she said, “Ah, ah, ah! En français!!” You feel wound-up frustrated in there. But here is the most surprising thing: I am learning French. Last Saturday, when the mailman came, I said, “Voici le facteur!” My father asked me What did I say and I said That was French for Here’s the mailman, and he said Is that right? So at home I am glad I have her. But in class it is a torture. Sometimes in class I see that my heel is jiggling bad.
Last in the day is home ec. Here is where they teach you how to make food you never want to eat and how to make clothes you never want to wear. Our menu for Fall Festival will be pork-sausage casserole. It has sweet potatoes and apples in it. The teacher’s name is Miss Woods and every time I see her I think about a woman who got colored wrong in the coloring book. She has really red hair, from a box, anyone can see. She wears way too much blusher and blue eye shadow. My best friend Cherylanne lives in Texas, where I just moved from last summer, and she knows everything about makeup. But I know she would throw up her hands in despair if she was told to fix this woman. Miss Woods talks in a high, excited voice and she hardly ever shuts up. I guess one good thing I could say about her is she is always in a good mood. We’re going to make aprons next week out of dishcloths.
And that’s school, except for the bus ride and homeroom. Homeroom is where they vote for people to be things and where the crabby teacher takes attendance. Every day, she looks like she has just been in a fight. And we are supposed to go to her with problems. She is our advisor. Here is her advice: Don’t bug me. And the bus ride? Imagine you are alone on a bumpy vehicle that smells like baloney and takes ten hours to go one block. That is it.
There is a routine on Saturday morning. First, my father sleeps late. I clean my room and then come into the kitchen to plan dinner, because that is my night to cook. I am good at meat loaf and baking whole things like a chicken. He doesn’t care if we have repeats, so this morning I am thinking I’ll just make meat loaf like I did last week. But when I sit down to eat cereal and look at my cookbook I find the recipe for Italian spaghetti and think maybe I’ll try that. It looks good all curled up on the plate. They also show you some bread sticks in a glass in the middle of the table and the tablecloth is red-and-white checkered. This is what my home ec teacher would call setting the scene. She’d probably tell you to play some Italian accordion music on the hi-fi, too. This cookbook is for kids and the first instruction is always this: Wash your hands. Like they’re talking to morons. I’ve outgrown it. But there are still some good ideas in it.
The spaghetti recipe says you have to use tomato sauce and tomato paste and Italian seasoning, which I don’t think we have. So I will have to wait until he wakes up to go to the store and get some. I kind of like getting ingredients you don’t have at home to make something. That puts you even more in the mood to make it. I wish I could go to the store myself, but nothing is walking distance from here except a church at the end of the block. It’s Catholic. It has a very quiet smell of incense all the time, which is nice, and it has very pretty windows, the stained-glass kind where the red looks like wine and the blue is so deep and beautiful you wish you could put it in your pocket and take it home with you. I like to sit in that church when no one is there, although I do sit in the back row, since we’re not members. The cushions are a dark-red velvet that turns lighter if you rub it the wrong way. Sometimes I kneel there, not to pray, just to make my head that kind of empty still that has a person feel more comfortable than they thought they were. The priest there is named Father Compton. He doesn’t mind my being there. He calls you “child” like he’s in the movies. He’s old and has whole tufts of white hair growing out of his nose and he walks bent over, but his eyes are clear and smart and they notice the right things. When he’s looking at you, you can tell he’s thinking kind thoughts, but he doesn’t embarrass you by saying them out loud. You don’t have to do anything back.
I am washing out my cereal bowl when the phone rings. I answer it quickly and there is my sister, Diane. It is such a miracle to hear her. I haven’t heard her voice since we moved here nearly six months ago. I hold the receiver so still, like she could fall out of it if I’m not careful. I feel tears start in my eyes, I’m so glad to hear her. “Where are you?” I say.
“Mexico. I’m still here. But listen, I’m coming to visit you!”
“You are?” I will have to wake him up to give her directions.
“Yes. For Thanksgiving.”
“And Dickie?”
“Yeah, he’ll come. He’ll bring me.” I hear the hidden sigh in her voice. She always seems to run into sadness. But when you hear t
hat sound in her voice, if you ask her what’s wrong she will say, What do you mean? It’s private to her.
I’ve wanted to talk to her so often and now I can’t think of anything to say. I just keep thinking, this is so expensive, this call is going so far, we’d better say something important. LONG DISTANCE is walking around in my brain.
“Katie?”
“Yeah?”
“Pay attention now, I don’t have much time. I’ll write, and then Dad can send me directions for how to get there.”
“Okay.”
“I’m pregnant.”
The air in me falls out. I hold the phone tighter. I don’t know what to say. Now she’s really going to be in trouble. Pregnant. The word sounds like the thing it is. I am thinking, for some reason, of one grape, held in the air between somebody’s two fingers.
“Are you there?” she asks. She’s laughing a little.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I’m pregnant, I said. I’m married, too.”
“Oh.”
“But… don’t tell Dad yet, okay?”
Well, I don’t know.
“Don’t tell him. I want to do it.”
“All right.”
“Just say I’ll be coming.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll be there the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We’ll make some pies. I miss you, Katie.”
“Me, too.”
When we hang up, I have an odd feeling that I made the whole thing up. But the receiver is warm. I have been on the phone. At my feet, my dog, Bridgette, is sitting and looking up at me. When I look down at her, she wags her tail. She wants out. I feel frozen. But Bridgette is squirming alive. I find her leash and put it on her. All she needs is to hear that little snapping sound and she turns around in circles like she’s dancing a polka.
When I get outside, I look across the street and see the living-room blinds move. I don’t think it’s the parents, I don’t think they’d be interested in watching. It’s the kids. They’re fourteen, and they’re twins, Greg and Marsha. I believe they are relatives of the devil. I have never met anyone so deliberately mean for no reason. I didn’t do anything but move here. I met them when we first came, like you have to, I have never asked them for anything, and they hate me. They leave notes in the bush outside my bedroom window. It started out with things like “Why don’t you go back to Texas, cowgirl?” but now they have graduated to every swearword they know. I haven’t told anyone. What good would it do? They wouldn’t say, Oh, sorry, want to hang around with us now? The worst thing is, I read those notes, every time. I know what’s going to be in them, but every time I open them and read them. I think about the hand, writing those notes, wearing a ring that it picked out. The notes are always in print, like script would be too nice.
I look away from the blinds, then back again, straight at them. I feel some strength just because Diane is coming. If they mess with her, she’ll wind them around the telephone pole, tie them there with their arms. Plus I can tell Diane what they’ve done. Her, I can tell. I told Cherylanne, but I haven’t heard back from her in a long time. I don’t think she’s exactly forgotten me, but if you said “Katie” to her she’d probably say, “Excuse me?”
I start walking Bridgette, figure in my head how long till Thanksgiving. Not long. Nineteen days. Not even one month. When I get home, I’ll make a countdown sheet. And maybe my father will be up and I’ll say, Guess what? He’ll be glad, too, though he probably won’t show it. He’ll hold it back, it will only be in his face in a kind of stiffness. But he’ll be glad. And I’ll tell Ginger. All of a sudden, I have plans again. I’ll write Cherylanne about how Diane was, all about how she looked and acted—Cherylanne always was interested in Diane because Diane paid no attention to her. I’ll bet Diane is still so pretty, but with a pregnant stomach. I hope she’s being careful. I think the skin over the baby is the really thin type. I think these blue lines run through it, that feed the baby. I don’t see how, though. There’s so much I need to find out now. I can have a project, keep some notes in a folder to show her when she gets here. A yellow one, for cheerfulness. I may find out things Diane never knew and she will be grateful. She may ask to keep the folder and I will let her. I’m going to be an aunt. Aunt Katie, I say to myself, but then I have to change it to Aunt Katherine. Which I like. I may put my hair in a bun when I’m around that baby. Plus I have some pearl clip-ons that from far away look exactly like pierced.
When I come in, my father is up, standing at the stove with his arms crossed, watching the coffee perk. He can’t go by the smell, like my mother did. He has to watch the color. He has his blue plaid robe on, and his feet are bare. This is his morning outfit. He sleeps in a T-shirt and his boxer underpants and then he puts on his robe to come out and make coffee. You can see his Adam’s apple, and how white and hairy his legs are. He kind of looks sad and too open, like a plucked chicken.
“She go?” he asks me, meaning the dog.
“Yup.”
“All right.”
He sits at the table, opens the paper.
“Did you hear the phone ring this morning?” I ask.
“No.” He doesn’t look up. He will in a minute.
“It was Diane. She’s coming to visit.”
Bingo. He looks up and closes the paper.
“When?”
“Thanksgiving.”
“Where is she?”
“Still in Mexico. Dickie’s coming, too.”
His face still, thinking. He looks away from me, nods. Then he looks back down at the paper. His tongue is doing something inside his mouth.
“Are you glad?”
“Yeah. I’m glad.” Still with the paper.
“I need to go to the grocery store. I’m making us Italian spaghetti tonight.”
“All right.”
I cross my legs, swing my foot, watch him reading. “I don’t really like it here so far,” I say.
“We haven’t been here that long.”
“Yes, but I still don’t. Other places were much friendlier. The people here, they aren’t friendly. The kids.”
He goes over to ther coffeepot, checks the color, turns off the flame, fills his cup. He takes a sip, looks over at me. “Wait awhile before you decide,” he says. “See how you feel after a few months.”
In my mind, there is a huge white calendar, big black numbers. You’d need a crane to lift the page.
I hear a thunking sound at my feet. Bridgette’s bone. And then she lies beside it, sighs happy out her nose. There are ways of not needing much. I pet her by the curly hair at the back of her neck. She’s a little like a cocker, with a lot of mystery thrown in. “Good girl,” I say. “You’re good. You just like your bone, don’t you? Yes, you just like that bone.”
“Katie,” my father says.
I look up. “Yes?”
Nothing. Oh. He just means, Quiet, I’m trying to read. “You’re a good girl,” I tell Bridgette, whispering. “Yes, you are.”
The next Wednesday, after school, I find a letter on my desk.
Dear Katie,
Well, I for one cannot believe how long it is since I wrote you. And you have written nineteen times! But if you knew what I’ve been doing you would be surprised I’m even writing now.
Number one is I am going steady with Todd Anderson and I don’t think I have to tell you he is a senior!! I have his ring on a chain, which I of course wear every day. It’s getting serious and there are some questions I need to answer in my own mind if you know what I mean, hast slumber party when we played Truth or Dare someone asked me would I ever let him go to third base. I had to think a long time because we were playing for real. But I am happy to say I searched my heart and could honestly answer no, I would not. But you’ll see when you go steady (anyway, DO you have a BOYFRIEND yet????) things get very serious in a fast way. I am going out with him tonight and I just finished my shower. I am under my hair dryer and it is so hot my ears are about to burn off! But of course you have
to. I got a new shadow today, English Teaberry, which I recommend to you.
I just read again in your one letter about those kids that put notes in your bushes. They are just backward and that’s all. You should put notes in their bushes. See how they like it. Or you could tell their parents, which is more mature. That’s what I would do. I would make an anonymous call and say, This is someone who cares, do you know what kind of children you have?
Listen to this. Bubba is quarterback now on the football team. He is so big he can hardly fit in king-size britches. He gets away with everything on account of practice is so hard, boo-hoo. He gets the most food as usual but now he gets it in between times too, the best things get saved for King Bubba and pity you if you eat it. He gets to sleep late every weekend and I as usual do all the work around here.
You asked if I look the same. Well, not really. I have longer hair and I wear it in a flip with a headband that matches what I wear. Which of course is all different from when you were here. A lot of people say I look like that model that is all the time in Seventeen magazine (if you don’t read it, get it NOW it is SO GOOD and has so many quizzes and helpful hints) and I don’t think it is bragging on myself to say I do agree. If you look in this month’s issue, there she is with that plaid pleated skirt and mohair sweater. Hers is black but I got white. It shows off jewelry better. And of course you have to be a little careful with black, what people might think you are saying! Anyway, if you look at that picture of that model, it’s like seeing me, everyone says so.
I liked your school picture, but Katie you need to remember to comb your hair before they take it. Just carry a fold-up rattail, they have them in tortoiseshell and white, and just keep it in your purse and it is always on the ready. It makes a difference. Not that I mean to be critical. You would know if you could hear me say it, that I am being kind. In writing it looks critical but it’s really not.