“They all sound screwy, if you ask me,” Gramps said.
“Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four—or more—chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve only got one or two, it’s almost harder. You have room left over—empty spaces that you think you’ve got to fill up.”
“Well, it sure ain’t a cinch being a father, either,” Gramps said.
Gram touched his arm. “Horsefeathers,” she said.
Round and round we drove until Gramps saw a parking space. Another car saw it too, but Gramps was fast and pulled in, and when the man in the other car waved his fist, Gramps said, “I’m a veteran. See this leg? Shrapnel from German guns. I saved our country!”
We did not have the correct change for the parking meter, so Gramps wrote a long note about how he was a visitor from Bybanks, Kentucky, and he was a World War II veteran with German shrapnel in his leg, and he kindly appreciated the members of the fair city of Madison allowing him to park in this space even though he did not have the correct change for the meter. He put this note on the dashboard.
“Do you really have German shrapnel in your leg?” I asked.
Gramps looked up at the sky. “Mighty nice day,” he said.
The shrapnel was imaginary. Sometimes I am a little slow to figure these things out. My father once said I was as gullible as a fish. I thought he said edible. I thought he meant I was tasty.
The city of Madison sprawls between two lakes, Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and dribbling out of these are other piddly lakes. It seemed as if the whole city was on vacation, with people riding around on their bikes and walking along the lakes and feeding the ducks and eating and canoeing and windsurfing. I’d never seen anything like it. Gram kept saying, “Huzza, huzza!”
There’s a part of the city where no cars can go, and thousands of people stroll around eating ice cream. We went into Ella’s Kosher Deli and Ice Cream Parlor and ate pastrami sandwiches and kosher dill pickles, followed by raspberry ice cream. After we walked around some more, we were hungry again, and so we had lemon tea and blueberry muffins at the Steep and Brew.
All the while, I heard the whispers: rush, hurry, rush. Gram and Gramps moved so slowly. “Shouldn’t we go now?” I kept asking, but Gram would say, “Huzza, huzza!” and Gramps would say, “We’ll go soon, chickabiddy, soon.”
“Don’t you want to send any postcards?” Gram asked.
“No, I do not.”
“Not even to your daddy?”
“No.” There was a good reason for this. All along her trip, my mother had sent me postcards. She wrote, “Here I am in the Badlands, missing you terribly,” and “This is Mount Rushmore, but I don’t see any presidents’ faces, I only see yours.” The last postcard arrived two days after we found out she wasn’t coming back. It was from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. On the front was a picture of a beautiful blue lake surrounded by tall evergreens. On the back she had written, “Tomorrow I’ll be in Lewiston. I love you, my Salamanca Tree.”
At last, Gramps said, “I sure hate to get back on the road, but time’s a-wastin’!”
Yes, I thought, yes, yes, yes!
Gram settled back for a nap while I said a few thousand more prayers. The next thing I knew, Gramps was pulling off the road again. “Lookee here,” he said. “The Wisconsin Dells.” He drove into a vast parking area and said, “Why don’t you two go look around? I’m going to get a little shut-eye.”
Gram and I poked our noses into an old fort, and then sat on the grass watching a group of Native Americans dance and beat drums. My mother had not liked the term Native Americans. She thought it sounded primitive and stiff. She said, “My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant.” In school, our teacher told us we had to say Native American, but I agreed with my mother. Indian sounded much better. My mother and I liked this Indian-ness in our background. She said it made us appreciate the gifts of nature; it made us closer to the land.
I lay back and closed my eyes, listening to the drums beat rush-rush-rush and the dancers chant hurry-hurry-hurry. Someone was jingling bells, too, and for a moment I thought of Christmas and sleigh bells. When I opened my eyes again, Gram was gone.
I glanced around, trying to remember where we had parked the car. I looked through the crowd, back at the trees, over at the concession stand. “They’ve gone,” I thought. “They’ve left me.” I pushed through the people.
The crowd was clapping, the drums were beating. I was all turned around and could not remember which way we had come. There were three signs indicating different parking areas. The drums thundered. I pushed further into the crowd of people, who were now clapping louder, in time with the drums.
The Indians had formed two circles, one inside the other, and were hopping up and down. The men danced in the outer circle and wore feather head-dresses and short leather aprons. On their feet were moccasins, and I thought again about Phoebe’s message: Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.
Inside the circle of men, the women in long dresses and ropes of beads had joined arms and were dancing around one older woman who was wearing a regular cotton dress. On her head was an enormous headdress, which had slipped down over her forehead.
I looked closer. The woman in the center was hopping up and down. On her feet were flat, white shoes. In the space between drum beats, I heard her say, “Huzza, huzza.”
11
FLINCHING
Early the next morning, we left Wisconsin and drove on, eating up the road through the lower rim of Minnesota. The land here was hilly and green, forests tucked in close beside the road, and the air smelled of pine.
“At last,” Gramps said, “some scenery! I love a place that has scenery, don’t you, chickabiddy?”
I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don’t know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.
I was glad to be able to go on with Phoebe’s story, because when I was talking about Phoebe, I wasn’t thinking about much else.
“Did Peeby get any more messages?” Gram asked.
She did. The following Saturday, Phoebe and I were going to Mary Lou’s again. As we left Phoebe’s house, there on the front steps was another white envelope with a blue sheet of paper inside. The message was: Everyone has his own agenda.
Phoebe and I looked up and down the street. There was no sign of the message-leaver. Mary Lou thought the messages (this one and the other one) were intriguing. “How exciting!” she said. “I wish someone would leave me messages!”
Phoebe thought the messages were spooky. It was not the words that bothered her—nothing too frightening there—it was the idea that someone was sneaking around and leaving them on her porch. She worried that someone was watching their house, waiting for the right moment to leave the message. Phoebe was a champion worrier.
We tried to figure out what the message meant. “Okay,” Phoebe said, “an agenda is a list of things to be discussed at a meeting—”
“So maybe it’s for your dad,” I suggested. “Does he go to meetings?”
“Well, I guess,” Phoebe said. “He’s ever so busy all day long.”
“Maybe it’s from his boss,” Mary Lou said. “Maybe your father hasn’t been conducting his meetings very well.”
“My father is very organized,” Phoebe said.
“What about the other message?” Mary Lou said. “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.”
“I know what it means,” I said. “I’ve heard my father use it lots of times. I used to imagine that there were two moons sitting in a pair of Indian shoes, but my father said it means that y
ou shouldn’t judge someone until you’ve walked in their moccasins. Until you’ve been in their shoes. In their place.”
“And your father says this often?” Phoebe said.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but my father isn’t creeping around leaving those messages. It isn’t his handwriting.”
When Ben came into Mary Lou’s room, she asked him what he thought it meant. He took a sheet of paper from her desk and quickly drew a cartoon. It was a little spooky, because what he drew was identical to what I used to imagine: a pair of Indian moccasins with two moons in them.
“Maybe,” Mary Lou said to Phoebe, “your father is being too quick to judge people at work. He needs to walk in their moccasins first.”
“My father does not judge too quickly,” Phoebe said.
“You don’t have to get defensive,” Ben said.
“I am not getting defensive. I’m just telling you that my father does not judge too quickly.”
Later, we went to the drugstore. I thought it was going to be only me and Phoebe and Mary Lou going, but by the time we left the house, we had accumulated Tommy and Dougie as well. At the last minute, Ben said he was coming too.
“I don’t know how you can stand it,” Phoebe said to Mary Lou.
“Stand what?”
Phoebe pointed to Tommy and Dougie, who were running around like wound-up toys, making airplane noises and train noises and zooming in between us and then running up ahead and falling over each other and crying and then leaping back up again and socking each other and chasing after bumblebees.
“I’m used to it,” Mary Lou said. “My brothers are always doing beef-brained things.”
Ben walked right behind me all the way, which made me nervous. I kept turning around to see what he was doing back there, but he was just strolling along smiling.
Tommy bashed into me, and when I started to fall backward, Ben caught me. He put his arms around my waist and held on to me, even after it was obvious that I was not going to fall. I could smell that funny grapefruit smell again and feel his face pressed up against my hair. “Let go,” I said, but he didn’t let go. I had an odd sensation, as if a little creature was crawling up my spine. It wasn’t a horrible sensation, more light and tickly. I thought maybe he dropped something down my shirt. “Let go!” I said, and finally he did.
It was at the drugstore that I got a little scared. Maybe I had been listening to Phoebe’s tales of lunatics and axe murderers too much. Phoebe and I were looking at the magazines when I felt as if someone was watching us. I looked over to where Ben was standing, but he and Mary Lou were busy rummaging around in the chocolate bars. The feeling did not go away. I turned the other way around, and there on the far side of the store was the nervous young man who had come to Phoebe’s house. He was at the cash register, paying for something, but he was staring at us while he was handing his money to the clerk. I nudged Phoebe. “Oh no,” she said, “the lunatic.” Phoebe hustled over to Ben and Mary Lou. “Look, quick, it’s the lunatic.”
“Where?”
“At the cash register.”
“There’s nobody there,” Mary Lou said.
“Honest, he was there,” Phoebe said. “I swear he was. Ask Sal.”
“He was there,” I said.
Later, when we had left Mary Lou and were on our way to Phoebe’s house, we heard someone running up behind us. Phoebe thought we were doomed. “If we get our heads bashed in and that lunatic leaves us here on the sidewalk—” she said.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out. My brain was saying, “Scream! Scream!” but my voice was completely shut off.
It was Ben. He said, “Did I scare you?”
“That wasn’t very funny,” Phoebe said.
“I’ll walk home with you,” he said. “Just in case there are any—any—lunatics around.” He had difficulty saying lunatic. On the way to Phoebe’s house Ben said some odd things. First, he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t call him a lunatic.”
“And why not?” Phoebe said.
“Because a lunatic is—it means—it sounds like—oh, never mind.” He would not explain, and he seemed embarrassed to have mentioned this in the first place. Then he said to me, “Don’t people touch each other at your house?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just wondered,” he said. “You flinch every time someone touches you.”
“I do not.”
“You do.” He touched my arm. I have to admit, my instinct was to flinch but I caught myself. I pretended not to notice that his hand was resting there on my arm. That creature tickling my spine was back. “Hmm,” he said, like a doctor examining a patient. “Hmm.” He removed his hand. “Where’s your mother?”
I had not mentioned my mother to anyone, not even Phoebe, except for the one time Phoebe had asked about her and I had only said she didn’t live with us.
Ben said, “I saw your father once, but I’ve never seen your mother. Where is she?”
“She’s in Idaho. Lewiston, Idaho.”
“What’s she doing there?” Ben said.
“I don’t really feel like saying.” It didn’t occur to me to ask him where his mother was.
He touched my arm again. When I flinched, he said, “Ha! Gotcha!”
It bothered me, what he had said. It occurred to me that my father didn’t hug me as much anymore, and that maybe I was starting to flinch whenever anyone touched me. I wasn’t always like that. We used to be a hugging family. As I walked along with Ben and Phoebe, I remembered a time when I was nine or ten. My mother crawled into bed with me and snuggled close and said, “Let’s build a raft and float away down a river.” I used to think about that raft a lot, and I actually believed that one day we might build a raft and float away down a river together. But when she went to Lewiston, Idaho, she went alone.
Ben touched Phoebe’s arm. She flinched. “Ha,” he said. “Gotcha. You’re jumpy, too, Free Bee.”
And that, too, bothered me. I had already noticed how tense Phoebe’s whole family seemed, how tidy, how respectable, how thumpingly stiff. Was I becoming like that? Why were they like that? A couple times I had seen Phoebe’s mother try to touch Phoebe or Prudence or Mr. Winterbottom, but they all drew back from her. It was as if they had outgrown her.
Had I been drawing away from my own mother? Did she have empty spaces left over? Was that why she left?
When we reached Phoebe’s driveway, Ben said, “I guess you’re safe now. I guess I’ll go.”
“Go ahead,” Phoebe said.
Mrs. Cadaver came screeching up to the curb in her yellow Volkswagen, with her wild red witch hair flying all over the place. She waved at us and started pulling things out of the car and plopping them on the sidewalk.
“Who’s that?” Ben asked.
“Mrs. Cadaver.”
“Cadaver? Like dead body?”
“That’s right.”
“Hi, Sal,” Mrs. Cadaver called. She dumped a pile of lumpy bags on the sidewalk. Ben asked if she wanted any help. “My, you’re very polite,” Mrs. Cadaver said, flashing her wild gray eyes.
“She scares me half to death,” Phoebe said. “Don’t go inside,” she whispered to Ben.
“Why not?” he said, too loudly, because Mrs. Cadaver looked up and said, “What?”
“Oh nothing,” Phoebe said.
Mrs. Cadaver said, “Sal, do you want to come in?”
“I was just going to Phoebe’s,” I said, glad for an excuse.
Phoebe’s mother came to her front door. “Phoebe? What are you doing? Are you coming in?”
We left Ben. As we were going in Phoebe’s house, we saw Ben lift something off the sidewalk. It was a shiny new axe.
Phoebe’s mother said, “Is that Mary Lou’s brother? Was he walking you home? Where’s Mary Lou?”
“I hate it when you ask me three questions in a row,” Phoebe said. Through the window, we could see Ben lugging the axe
up the front steps of Mrs. Cadaver’s house. Phoebe called out, “Don’t go in!” but when Mrs. Cadaver held the front door open, Ben disappeared inside.
“Phoebe, what are you doing?” her mother asked.
Then Phoebe pulled the envelope out of her pocket, the envelope containing the newest message. “I found this outside,” Phoebe said.
Mrs. Winterbottom opened the envelope carefully, as if it might contain a miniature bomb. “Oh sweetie,” she said. “Who is it from? Who is it for? What does it mean?” Phoebe explained what an agenda was. “I know what an agenda is, Phoebe. I don’t like this at all. I want to know who is sending these.”
I was waiting for Phoebe to tell her about seeing the nervous young man at the drugstore, but Phoebe didn’t mention it. A little later we saw Ben leave Mrs. Cadaver’s house. He appeared to be all in one piece.
That day when I got home, my father was in the garage, tinkering with the car. He was leaning over the engine, and I couldn’t see his face at first. “Dad—what do you think it means if someone touches someone else and the person being touched flinches? Do you think it means that the person being touched is getting too stiff?”
Dad turned slowly around. His eyes were red and puffy. I think he had been crying. His hands and shirt were greasy, but when he hugged me, I didn’t flinch.
12
THE MARRIAGE BED
When I had first started telling Phoebe’s story, Gram and Gramps sat quietly and listened. Gramps concentrated on the road, and Gram gazed out the window. Occasionally, they interjected a “Gol-dang!” or a “No kidding?” But as I got farther into the story, they began to interrupt more and more.
When I told about the message Everyone has his own agenda, Gram thumped on the dashboard and said, “Isn’t that the truth! Lordy! Isn’t that what it is all about?”
I said, “How do you mean?”