Outside In (12 page)

I almost laughed, it was so unfunny. But when it rained, I let Dad drive me to school. Mom was supposed to come pick me up, but I noticed that she made sure I had an umbrella. Poor old Mom was tired all the time now, and often Aimée and I got home and found her sound asleep.

The first rainy day I waited for Mom to come in her car. When she didn’t come, I called her from the school office.

“I’ll be there soon,” she said drowsily. “Start walking.”

I did, watching the cars closely. When a green station wagon went by, I tilted the umbrella to hide my face. I was at Chauncey Road before I saw Mom’s car coming. It wasn’t worth her effort.

“Look,” I said, “are you just going to come automatically if it rains? Or are you going to decide it’s not raining that hard?”

“That’s pretty fresh, Chérie,” Mom said.

It wasn’t the only thing that worried me.

I wanted my hair cut, and Mom wouldn’t let me. I got so upset I’d stand and stare at my braids in the mirror and cry over them, wanting so much to look different.

I hated my glasses and went to school without them, but I couldn’t see—especially on my bike.

Then I found that you could see the edges of my still-new bra through my pale uniform blouse, so I insisted on wearing a school sweater every day even though it was still warm out.

And the idea of standing in front of science class, giving a report on a body part, made me want to throw up.

I got home one day, and Mom was out. I didn’t want to be home alone, so I went to Aunt Bonnie’s. “Upstairs!” she yelled when she heard my knock. Nobody was home but Aunt Bonnie, of course, or I wouldn’t have gone over there.

I went up the stairs slowly and walked slowly past Dave’s door. The baseball still floated on the wall; the Mousetrap was still gathering dust on the bookshelf. His baseball cleats were on the floor, and a book,
A Bell for Adano,
lay open, facedown, on his bed.

“Come in here, mademoiselle, and tell me what I’ve been painting.”

The painting was still abstract, but it was obviously a square red house with yellow window rectangles and green trees like upside-down cones. “Our house,” I said.

“How can you tell?”

“Cherry red. Does Mom know?”

“No,” said Aunt Bonnie. “And don’t you tell her, mademoiselle.”

“I won’t!” I stuck up for myself.

“Miss Knower-of-All-Secrets,” she said, and smiled.

“Why are you painting our house?” I asked.

“For love,” she said.

That’s how I knew it was a present for Mom, a match to the one Aunt Bonnie had done of her own house from our front porch. That one hung over the mantel in the Ascontis’ living room.

Joanie and I finished setting up the elves’ mailbox and crawled out from under the forsythia bushes. Dave was standing on his deck.

“Chérie?” he said politely. “Did you do your science report?”

It was the first time he hadn’t called me “You!” in front of Joanie. “What the heck body part am I supposed to do?” I said, to Joanie more than Dave.

Joanie pretended to drool. “Why not do the salivary gland?”

“Are you going to?” Aimée stuck her head out from under her bush.

“Buzz off!” I threw a leaf at Aimée.

“What are you doing?” Joanie asked Dave. Why was
she
talking to him when I wasn’t?

“The funny bone,” he said.

“Get out!”

“No, really. He said I could.”

I sat down on the steps.

“It’s an actual bone?” asked Joanie.

“I’ll never tell.”

“Well, you’ll have to,” I said thoughtlessly. I was surprised
at how easy it was to forget not to talk to Dave. What had made him come out to talk to me now, when Joanie was there?

“And you’ll have to wait for the report,” he said.

“Aw, come on!” said Joanie, who wasn’t in our school.

Dave’s eyes glowed. “Well, I just happen to have something up my sleeve.” He pushed up his sleeve to reveal a color diagram of the funny bone—a nerve between two bones—drawn perfectly in red, black, blue, and pink Magic Marker on the skin of his arm.

“Cool!” said Aimée, still tagging along.

“It’s not for tomorrow, is it?” I panicked. Alphabetical order, I told myself. Asconti comes long before Witkowski.

But Dave shook his head. “Just practicing, dopus,” he said. “It’s not due until Monday.”

I sighed. I hadn’t gone to the library yet to see what books were there. I hadn’t even chosen a body part. All I knew was that I didn’t want to have to get up and—I wouldn’t think about it.

“Who’s going to hang this horrendous wallpaper?” Dad yelled.

“You!” said Mom.

He slammed out of the house to the front porch, where I was folding papers, my yellow and white striped wallpaper in his hand.

I said, “If I have to move all my stuff—
all
my stuff!—out of my room, then I get to pick the wallpaper.”

“You’re going to have to leave that wallpaper behind anyway,” Dad said cautiously, as if he were worried how I’d react. I’d scream, I’d rage, I’d go cuckoo…. Not about this!

“I want to leave the room looking beautiful if I’m going to have to leave it,” I said solemnly.

“Chérie, you sound as though you’re leaving life its own self.” I stuck out my tongue. Dad held up the wallpaper and stuck out
his
tongue. “This looks like a circus tent.”

“I picked it out.”

“Well, that explains it.” He sat on the steps, bit the end of his pretzel stick, stuck the rest behind his ear, and said, “So what does the
Bell
say today?”

“Ding-dong,” I said.

He picked up the paper:
OLYMPIANS HEAD FOR MEXICO CITY
.

“Mom’s just trying to make the place look nice,” I said. “It’s not her fault about my color sense.”

Dad did not say, “Color nonsense,” the way Mom or Aunt Bonnie would have. He stared off into space. “She’s crazy when she’s expecting,” he said. As if I hadn’t noticed. News flash!

“Why? Isn’t she happy?”

“Oh, she’s happy,” he said. “Just crazy, that’s all.”

“I don’t get why—” I said.

“Look, Chérie,” Dad said at the same time. I stopped so he could go on. “Things are going to change when the baby’s born. For the rest of us, I mean.”

I waited.

“You and Aimée are going to have to share a room, for one. And there’ll be chaos for a while. Mom won’t get much sleep, and I can’t take off work. You’re almost a teenager, Chérie. You’ll have to help, do laundry, clean up.”

“Where’s Aunt Bonnie going to be?” I asked, practically growling. I didn’t mean Aunt Bonnie. I meant him. This was rich. I didn’t like how he’d just dropped that bomb about sharing my room.

“Aunt Bonnie?” Dad repeated. He gave me such a look, like of course Aunt Bonnie wasn’t going to do anything,
and neither was he. It would be only me, the almost teenager. “What I started to say,” Dad said, “is that everything is already changing, for Mom. She’s miles ahead of us, trying to figure out how everything’s going to be, where everyone’s going to go, how Aimée’s going to be about it—”

He stopped and just looked pitiful, as if Aimée were the worst problem ever. Well, she could be.

“She’s pretty used to being the baby,” I said. What about how I was going to feel?

Dad bit his thumb. “Eight years old—” he said. It occurred to me that Dad was as tired of Aimée’s nervous Nellie act as I was. Only I was just as nervous as Aimée was, if he only knew.

“She’s going to
have
to learn to ride a bike,” I said, sounding as loudmouth sure of myself as Aunt Bonnie herself. “Then she could go riding with Pammy.”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Dad. His mouth hung open.

“I want her to take over my route someday,” I said.

“Your route? Aimée?” His mouth closed tensely now.

“She’d be better at it,” I said. “She wouldn’t get so bored with the houses.” Aimée would invent personalities and lives for the people in the houses. She’d think it was a game. If she could only ride a bike … “Maybe she could do it on foot,” I said.

“What, walk all that way?”

I waved my hand. “It’s no farther than she walks to school.”

“Chérie, she’s
eight.”

“Well, Lucy was only ten.”

“Cher, is something wrong with your paper route?” Dad asked.

“Oh, I’m just sick of all that news,” I said.

“It’s what’s happening out there,” Dad said softly. But his answer was so automatic that my eyes stung and pricked. I thought about how he used to want to throw Aimée into the water at the beach, how he’d said that was the way to teach a scared kid to swim. Thank God Mom hadn’t let him.

I thought how it would feel, just being thrown in. Take that! It was as if no matter what happened “out there,” everyone just
had
to hear all about it, no matter how awful or sad. Tough luck. That’s life.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

“Don’t you think it’s important to know?”

“No,” I whispered, hugging my knees. My braids hung down, and I wrapped them around my calves. There was already too much in my head this year. I didn’t need to know one more thing about what was going on in the outside world.

“Dad,” I asked, looking up, “can I cut my hair?”

“Man!” He blew out a breath. “Why?”

“I want to,” I said. “I’ll pay for it with my paper money.”

“Maybe,” Dad said. “There’s a baby on the way, don’t forget.”

“So, what does that have to do with my hair?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you, Chérie.”

“Tell me what?”

“How it is for Mom.”

“She’s nuts. You said so.”

“I did not! But she’s having a new baby, so maybe she’ll let you go.”

“Let me go?”

Dad grabbed his own hair in both his hands. “Son of a gun, Chérie, let you go get your hair cut!” he said.

“Really?” I asked, all hopeful.

He stared at me like an insane person. Maybe things change early for the father, too, I thought.

“I’d rather share my room with the baby than Aimée,” I said. “She sleeps with the light on.”

His eyes bugged out at me. He walked away down the path.

“Dad?” He crossed Marvin Road, going to Uncle Joe’s house, in search of sanity, or just male company.

“No more, Chérie. No more!”

I bet he didn’t want another girl. Who would?

I
MAY HAVE NEEDED GLASSES
, but there was nothing wrong with my ears. In fact I felt like one big ear, unable to keep from hearing the radio as it blared from the kitchen. Wendy Boland had disappeared, it seemed, off the face of the earth as well as the paper or the television news broadcasts. I stayed in my room, away from the news, working on elf furniture, hoping Mom would forget about putting my boxes away. But I couldn’t close off my ears.

Even in my room I couldn’t help hearing the sour tones of my parents arguing about moving, couldn’t help slipping down the stairs to hear what they said: If they were going to move, he’d move anywhere. But she wanted to stay in the area, keep us in the same schools. Blah, blah, blah.

I escaped to the circle, scooting under the Ascontis’ windows down their driveway. I couldn’t help hearing Aunt Bonnie yelling at Uncle Joe about how he had to do his duty for his country and his sons. You couldn’t mistake her voice, not from the elf house forsythia bush in the Rankins’ backyard. She wasn’t crying in the fights. She wasn’t arguing back. She was yelling.

Uncle Joe was no longer ranting, raving, no longer yelling. His voice when he spoke was quiet and calm. I couldn’t hear what he said. And I didn’t, this time, slip away to somewhere else. I might have, but when I spied out, I saw Dave sitting on his deck. He wasn’t moving. He didn’t have a book or a ball in his hand. He just sat with his arms crossed over his knees. I couldn’t tell if he was listening or not listening.

When he dropped his head onto his arms, I stood up out of the forsythia bush and watched him until he looked up at me. “What do you want?” he snarled.

“Want to see what I’m doing?” I asked.

Dave stared at me for a second. Then his face changed. He came and squatted down beside the bush and peeked inside. I held a branch back so he could see. His face changed even more, softening. He looked the way he used to when we were playing Merlin and Wart in the woods, as if he could imagine how it felt to be an elf. He put his head on the ground, his eyes helping him see things from an elf’s-eye view.

I kept remembering how much I liked him. I picked up an elf and walked it around the elf house like a tour guide, sending it up and down the elevator. I showed him the water hoses. Finally I sat the elf in a bottle cap chair and looked over at Dave, on his knees beside me. “Your mom made the chair,” I said.

“Looks like her work,” he said.

I moved a little closer. I smelled fall leaves and butterscotch Life Savers and Uncle Joe’s cigarette smoke. I said, “How is your father supposed to do his duty to his country?”

“In the army reserves,” he said. Uncle Joe, in
any
kind of army? Hopeless. Dave shrugged and shook his head.

Then, from inside his house, high heels clattered sharply toward the back door. Dave and I hid automatically, hunching lower under the bushes. We were stuck there, our backs to the bushes, sneaking peeks over our shoulders, hiding from Aunt Bonnie as she hunched over a cigarette on her deck steps, puffing and crying. Dave’s head was so low he could have leaned it on my shoulder.