All She Ever Wanted (9 page)

When they weren’t tormenting Mrs. Garvey or trying to kill Larry Grout, my brothers were busy setting things on fire. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them for one minute. They could burn down someone’s shed in the time it took me to run inside and use the bathroom. They also took great delight in hiding aerosol cans in the neighbors’burning barrels and waiting for the explosions. Most kids loved summer vacation and hated returning to school, but I was just the opposite. I couldn’t wait for school to start again.

I was thrilled to discover that May and I were in the same fifth-grade class that fall, with Mr. Standish as our teacher. Once again, May chose me as her best friend, but this time it was because she was flunking mathematics and needed my help.

I loved numbers. They were so neat and precise and easy to control, while the rest of my life was always in chaos: I never knew when we would eat or when I’d have to go to bed hungry; when my father would be home so we’d all be happy or when I’d wake up to find Uncle Leonard snoring on the sofa; when my mother would wash my clothes or when she would be holed up in her sanctuary; when Annie would wet our bed in the middle of the night or when I’d get a good night’s sleep.

I lived a disorganized life that was never predictable, but numbers— ah, numbers behaved in an orderly fashion: One plus one always equaled two. I could memorize the multiplication and addition tables, knowing they would never change. I loved long division, even with remainders. I liked nothing better than solving a crisp page of word problems, especially the ones with trains coming from different directions at different speeds, or the ones where I had to figure out how many pounds of tomatoes I could buy at thirty-nine cents a pound if I only had two dollars. Other kids would groan when Mr. Standish handed out a work sheet on fractions, but I looked forward to finding common denominators. They offered a glimpse of Uncle Leonard’s perfect society where all differences would be equalized and collectivized. Best of all, no one else in my class came close to challenging me as a math whiz. I scored A’s on all my tests. Mr. Standish took me aside and told me I was the best math student he’d ever had. He said I had a gift.

May Elizabeth, on the other hand, still didn’t know her times tables and needed to drill with flash cards. Mr. Standish asked me to coach her. We’d find a quiet corner in the back of the room and I’d hold up a card with
6 X 8
on it, for example, and she’d say, “I don’t know… fortysomething?”

I would tell her what my daddy always said: “Close doesn’t count except with hurricanes and hand grenades.” He had fought in the war, so he knew about things like that.

“Let’s do our homework together,” May begged. “You can come to my house after school.”

It was a dream come true. I would have to walk Poke home first, but then I would circle back to May’s neighborhood to do homework with her. Her mother gave us snacks to eat after school, things like Hostess cupcakes and Pepsi-Cola and potato chips—treats that were unheard of at my house. I got to watch all of my favorite after-school TV shows in living color, and the picture on the screen never even budged.

“I hate math,” May Elizabeth groaned, lying beside me on the shag carpet in front of the TV. I could do a page of math homework in the time it took May to do the first problem.

“It would be a lot easier if you learned your times tables,” I told her, scooping the filling out of another Twinkie with my tongue.

May sighed, pouting. “I know, but please,
please,
just tell me what answer you got for number one?
Please?
Just this once?”

Of course it never was “just once.” She copied my homework every single night, then wondered why she got Ds and Fs on her tests. I didn’t care; I was eating Cheez Doodles every afternoon until my tongue turned orange. My life seemed almost happy for the first time that I could ever recall, and I was so afraid that it wouldn’t last.

It didn’t.

That year, 1960, was an election year, and the race for the White House was heating up between Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. Our teacher thought we should learn more about politics and government, so he decided we would attend the presidential debates. Not the real ones, of course. The debate club at Riverside High School was holding a mock debate in the school auditorium between the local leaders of the two political parties. Our class was going to walk three blocks to the high school for a field trip and watch the proceedings.

Everything would have been fine if my dad had been home, but he wasn’t. I had to give the field trip permission slip to Uncle Leonard to sign.

“This is outrageous!” he bellowed, his face turning as red as his politics.

“It’s okay, Uncle Leonard. It’s just a dumb assembly in the auditorium.”

I tried to pull the permission slip out of his hands. “Never mind, Mommy can sign it for me.” The only reason I had asked him in the first place was because I hadn’t wanted to venture outside to the outhouse to look for my mother. Now I was sorry I hadn’t. Uncle Leonard wouldn’t be silenced.

“This is America!” He banged his fist on the chrome table so hard he made a pile of his yellow legal tablets slide to the floor. “I thought we had freedom of speech in America.”

“We do, Uncle Leonard. Our teacher explained it to us. That’s why they’re having this debate.”

“Well, I demand to know why the Communist Party wasn’t invited to debate the issues like any other political party?”

I was only ten, but I could have told him why they hadn’t been invited. America was fighting the Cold War. Everyone hated the Communists. Our fathers had just fought a war against the Nazis, and now the Communists were trying to take over the world. The Russians were going to rain down missiles on America and nuke us in our sleep and take over our lives. From cradle to grave, those stinking Commies would get to decide everything we did: who went to school and who didn’t, what we studied, who we married, where we worked—just like they did in the USSR and Red China. Children would be raised in communes—which was fine with me as long as I wasn’t on the same commune as Poke and JT and Annie. The Communists would force us to dress alike and live in identical houses—again, fine with me as long as the houses and clothes looked like May Elizabeth’s and not mine.

The Communists would take away our freedom—along with our TVs and our cars and our professional baseball teams. But first there would be a nuclear war and all the horrors that went with it. Ever since the Russians launched
Sputnik
in 1957 and got a head start in the space race, everyone knew that the Communists were just a day or two away from launching their bombs from outer space. We had air raid drills in class every couple of months. The town siren would go off and Mr. Standish would holler, “Duck and cover!” and we had to huddle beneath our desks, turning our backs away from the huge picture windows and covering our eyes to shield them from the blast. But even if you were lucky enough to survive the mushroom cloud, you still had to worry about radiation poisoning. The water would be unsafe to drink and the air unsafe to breathe, and you would have to stay in your fallout shelter—if you were rich enough to have one—until it was safe to come out in three or four years. Yes, everyone hated the Communists. And my uncle was one.

“I have some phone calls to make,” Uncle Leonard said. He hurried next door to use the Grouts’telephone, still carrying my permission slip. I had to ask Mr. Standish for a new one and give it to Mom to sign.

On the day of the mock Kennedy-Nixon debate, our class walked the three blocks to the high school beneath gorgeous blue skies. The air was fragrant with the smell of burning leaves, and the trees scattered a trail of red and orange and yellow leaves in our path. Life seemed wonderful.

Then I walked into the auditorium and saw Uncle Leonard sitting up on the stage between the Democrat and the Republican, and I knew that my peaceful life was over. The infamous lice infestation would be nothing compared to the humiliation I was about to face.

The Kennedy man was introduced first, but I didn’t hear a word he said above the sound of fear roaring in my ears. What was my uncle doing up there? In what new way was I about to be mocked and blackballed? My stomach writhed into knots. The Democrat finished his speech and sat down. The president of the debate club walked to the podium again.

“Next we will hear from Mr. Leonard Bartlett, president of the Tri-County Communist Party. …” The rest of the introduction was drowned out by a chorus of booing. There was no applause for my uncle as there had been for the first speaker. I slid further down in my seat.

Uncle Leonard ambled to the podium, his face gloomier than I’d ever seen it. He was such a gangly, awkward man that he walked like a marionette being controlled by a three-year-old. He held up his hands for silence and the booing grew louder still. He gripped the microphone and spent four or five painful minutes trying to talk about the Communist Party while the catcalls in the auditorium became progressively louder and wilder. Kids fired spitballs and threw stuff at him. I slithered so far down in my seat that I was nearly on the floor.

Finally the principal stood and tried to restore order, banging on the podium with his fist. “Use your shoe, like Khrushchev at the UN,” someone yelled. After that the assembly turned into a free-for-all and the debate had to be cancelled. Uncle Leonard smiled, probably because the Republican hadn’t had a chance to speak yet. My uncle hated Richard Nixon.

No one dared to walk beside me on the trip back to class. Even though my last name was Gallagher, everyone knew that the town Communist was my uncle. I acquired a new nickname: “Kathy the Commie.” I thought it was an improvement over “Cootie Kathy” until pranksters splashed red paint all over the front of our house. Someone painted a crude hammer and sickle on the trunk of my uncle’s car, too. If Daddy had been home he would have just laughed and painted over it, but Uncle Leonard refused to hide the red paint. He was proud of being “Red.”

“Leave it on there,” he told my mother. “I want these kids to see what kind of a country they’re growing up in. This would never happen in Russia.”

Of course not, I wanted to say. The Russians sent dissidents to Siberia where paint froze in July. I crept into my mother’s bedroom later that night to have a talk with her.

“Mommy, when is Daddy coming home?”

She blew out a stream of cigarette smoke. “Three to six months.”

“Can’t you make Uncle Leonard move out? Please? The kids are all making fun of me at school again, just like they did when I had lice.”

Being called a Communist was worse, though. There was no shampoo to wash away that shame. Mom stared at her lap, not at me.

“You don’t know what shame is,” she murmured. “When I was growing up, my mother… Never mind.”

“Why does Uncle Leonard have to live here?Why can’t he get his own house?”

“Uncle Leonard is a good man,” she said fiercely. “And America is a free country. He’s entitled to believe whatever he wants.”

The mocking and teasing I received after the debate lasted even longer than after the cootie episode. May Elizabeth stopped needing my help with her homework. No more Twinkies and potato chips. I hated my uncle.

Then one day May came to school with another dramatic announcement: “Guess what! My daddy had a fallout shelter built in our backyard, so now we can survive a nuclear war!”

I was certain that a Commie like me would never be allowed anywhere near it, but when the dismissal bell rang at the end of the day, May turned to me and said, “Want to come over to my house and see it? Maybe Mommy will let us do our homework inside it. Won’t that be fun?”

The Hayworths’fallout shelter was the most impressive thing I’d ever seen. They had bought the deluxe luxury model, of course, so May’s family would be safe even if a hydrogen bomb exploded twenty miles away in Bensenville. The shelter was a fourteen-by-eight-foot steel cylinder buried four feet beneath the Hayworths’backyard.

“It comes with everything,” May gushed as she gave me the grand tour. “See? Canned food and water, a fold-down bed with an air mattress for each of us, and a radio so we’ll know when it’s safe to come out.”

“I hope you bought extra batteries in case the electricity goes out,” I said, always the practical one.

“We don’t need batteries. Daddy says we can make our own electricity with this.” She pointed to a brand new generator.

“Won’t you go crazy locked in here for years and years?” I asked. I hadn’t had a chance to calculate the volume of a fourteen-by-eight-foot cylinder yet, but the thought of being stuck in this tank with my family for even one hour made me feel like screaming. May shook her head.

“We’ve stashed away lots of books and puzzles and board games to play. And the shelter comes with protective suits so we can walk around outside afterward. And see this?” she asked, brandishing a small yellow box with lots of wires and dials. “This is our very own Geiger counter so we can measure the radiation.”

“It looks like your father thought of everything,” I said wistfully. The fallout shelter was sturdier and better stocked and waterproofed than our house. I didn’t see any toilet facilities, but I was sure Mr. Hayworth had thought of that, too—and hopefully a can opener.

May was quiet for a long moment before saying, “Can I ask you a question?”

My stomach rolled over like a trained dog, but I shrugged and said, “Okay. …”

“Are you really a Communist?”

“No! Of course not! I hate the Commies as much as everyone else does. It’s just my stupid uncle who likes them—and I don’t think I’m really related to him. I keep hoping they’ll tell me I was adopted or they’ll find out that someone gave Mommy the wrong baby at the hospital, so I can go live with normal people.”

“Oh, I hope so, too!” May said in her dramatic way. She gripped my hands in both of hers and gave them a little squeeze. “Maybe they’ll find out that we’re really sisters! Maybe they got you and Ron mixed up and my brother will have to go live at your house and you can live here.”

“It would be pretty hard to get us mixed up,” I said, sounding practical again. “For one thing, Ron is two years older than me. And for another thing… well…” I paused, reluctant to get into a discussion of “basic equipment.”