As Simple as It Seems (3 page)

I struggled through the rest of the school year, keeping to myself and fighting a secret battle against the rotten forces I knew were at work inside me. I'd already lost Annie. After the Christmas ski trip, she and Heather had become even closer. By Easter the two of them were as intertwined as the milky stems of the dandelions Annie and I had spent hours together weaving into chains. The cherry on top of my fifth-grade year was seeing Chris Cartwright holding hands with Annie out in the parking lot right before the graduation ceremony. My parents and I had just gotten out of the car when my mother gasped and pointed.

“Is that
your
Annie with the Cartwright boy?” she whispered.

But it wasn't my Annie. Not anymore.

 

For some mysterious reason that spring the lilac bush in our front yard bloomed late. After the graduation ceremony, as my parents and I climbed out of the car, the air was heavy with the sweet scent of lilac, and the full branches arched out of the bush like rockets shooting off purple sprays of fireworks. My mother held the camera in her hand, the black plastic strap tight around her wrist.

“What do you say we take the photo in front of the lilacs this year, Verbie? We might as well take advantage of this late bloom. It may never happen again.”

It had always been a tradition in my family for me to pose for a photograph on the first and last day of every school year. My mother, an avid scrapbooker, pasted the photos into a big book with a cover decorated to look like a blackboard, the words
School Daze
written on it in chalk. Apparently she'd also been sending copies of the photos to Grace Kincaid, and although she'd never received a reply, the cards hadn't been returned either.

“I don't want to have my picture taken,” I grumbled.

I had read up on fetal alcohol syndrome and knew now that in addition to my small size and learning difficulties, the damage Grace Kincaid's drinking had caused
included my bad eyesight and the unusual smoothness of the space between my upper lip and my nose. I felt hideous.

“Come here, Sugarpea,” my mother called to me as she rummaged in her purse in search of a comb. “We need to tidy you up a bit first.”

“I just told you, I don't want you to take my picture,” I said. “And I don't want you to call me Sugarpea anymore either. It's
babyish
.”

All I wanted was to get inside and take my shoes off. There were two painful blisters the size of dimes on the backs of my heels—the price I was paying for having ignored my mother's suggestion to try on my black shoes the day before to make sure they still fit.

“Just give it a quick once-over,” my mother said, holding the comb out to me.

“
No picture
,” I told her, pushing my glasses up with a bent knuckle and then pulling them partway back down my nose again.

My mother looked at my feet and frowned.

“Are those shoes pinching?” she asked.

I hadn't told her the shoes were too small.

“There's nothing wrong with my shoes,” I said, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw hurt. I didn't want to lose
my temper. Ever since I'd found out the truth about who I really was, I'd been trying to control the angry feelings I had inside, trying to keep the rotten part of me from taking over.

“These pictures are a tradition in our family, Sugarpea,” my mother said.

“Not anymore,” I told her, still gritting my teeth. “And how many times do I have to tell you—
stop calling me Sugarpea
.”

Exasperated, my mother turned to my father.

“Can you please talk to her, Tom?”

“I'll do my best,” he told her.

My father came over and put his arm around me.

“Bena,” he said, giving my shoulder a little squeeze.

I sighed and pushed his arm away. I knew what he was going to say. He always took her side.

“You know how your mother feels about those scrapbooks of hers. Why all this fuss over one little picture?”

“She's the one who's making the fuss,” I said.

“Someday you'll be glad to have a picture to help you to remember this time in your life,” my mother called from across the yard.

Red-hot anger rose inside me like lava in a volcano. Didn't she know this had been the worst year of my life?
Not only had I lost my best friend, I had lost myself as well.

“One little picture, Bena, that's all she's asking,” my father said.

 

It took everything I had, but in the end I managed to push my anger back down inside long enough to let my mother take my picture in front of the lilac bush. But I can't look at it now without feeling a pang. I remember what I was thinking about as the shutter clicked.

 

My mother volunteered at the Sullivan County Humane Society. The vet at the shelter was a man named Dr. Finn, and he knew my mother had a soft spot for stray animals, particularly the ones with the saddest stories. He'd call her up to ask if she could come take a look at some poor unfortunate creature someone had brought into the clinic or left in a cardboard box on his doorstep in the middle of the night. Once she was there, he would ask her if she'd be willing to foster the animal “just for a little while,” until it either died or recovered enough to be put up for adoption. He knew perfectly well that any animal my mother agreed to take home was going to end up living out whatever was left of its life in her care. Teddy was the one exception.

He was a big dog—a boxer-shepherd mix—brown and sleek and strong. He had seemed friendly at first, wagging his tail and licking everybody's face. But deep down inside, it turned out Teddy was mean. He got into fights with the other animals in the house, and if you came anywhere near him when he was eating, he'd not only growl at you, he'd snap. I was just a toddler when Teddy came to live with us, a little girl who didn't know better than to try to hug a dog while it was eating its dinner. So he bit me. I still have a crescent-shaped scar on my wrist to prove it. First thing the next morning, my mother put Teddy in the car and drove him back to the shelter. We never talked about what happened to him after that.

It was Teddy I was thinking about that day as I posed for my mother in front of the lilacs. I was wondering if his meanness had showed from the outside, or if, like mine, it was hidden in his blood like poison. My memory of Teddy was foggy—I was only three years old when he bit me—but my mother kept a scrapbook of pictures of all the animals we'd taken in, and it occurred to me that maybe there would be a picture of Teddy in there.

Later that same afternoon when my mother left the house to go into town on an errand, I went into the
den to find that scrapbook.
Friends “Fur”-Ever
it said on the cover, which was decorated with little paw prints. I searched every page for a picture of Teddy, and when I didn't find one, I began to go through the loose photographs my mother kept in shoe boxes on the tall shelves that lined the walls of the room.

Scrapbooking had overtaken the den. Everywhere you looked there was an explosion of colored ribbons, or shiny strips of border papers decorated with stickers. There were plastic bins bursting with decals and rubber stamps, and on a folding card table sat a giant paper cutter surrounded by coffee cans jammed full of scissors and markers. The scrapbooks themselves, bound in blue leather, occupied two whole sets of shelves in the room, and the floor was so littered with confetti—tiny cutout shapes of bears, kittens, and hearts from the paper punches she used—it looked like a circus parade had passed through.

I didn't find any pictures of Teddy in the shoe boxes. I wasn't sure if that was because he'd been with us for such a short time that no photographs were ever taken, or if my mother had decided not to keep any pictures of Teddy because she felt bad about what had happened to him. As I was leaving the room, I glanced up and something caught my eye. On top of one of the sets
of shelves lay a flat white box tied with a red string. I'd never noticed it before, and curious to see what was inside, I ran and got the stepstool from the kitchen.

The box wasn't very heavy, and once I got it down I was surprised to find my name written across the top in my mother's careful handwriting. When I untied the string and opened the box, I discovered it was full of little pieces of me I was not even aware that my mother had been saving. There was a lock of my hair, a plastic box containing several baby teeth I'd left under my pillow for the tooth fairy, a note to Santa painstakingly printed in block letters with red crayon, and in the very bottom of the box, carefully wrapped in white tissue paper, the little peapod dress. My mother had fished it out of the throwaway pile, unable to bear the thought of some other little girl wearing it.

I had just lifted the dress from the box when I heard my mother's car coming up the driveway. Quickly I put everything back where I had found it and managed to be standing out in the kitchen drinking a glass of milk by the time my mother walked in the door carrying a bag of groceries in her arms.

“I've got your favorite. Orange Popsicles,” she said as she set the bag down on the counter. She had not changed out of the peapod dress she'd worn to the
graduation ceremony that morning, and as I looked at her standing there smiling at me, I was so sad for both of us I wanted to cry.

“You're having a hard day, aren't you?” she said. “Would a Popsicle help?”

I wanted to run to her and bury my face in her warm neck. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was that I was ugly and small and mean. How sorry I was that instead of the perfect little girl she'd always dreamed of having, she'd ended up with me. Instead I asked her a question.

“Why did you send Teddy away?”

She seemed surprised.

“Teddy?”

“Why didn't you give him a second chance after he bit me?” I asked.

She stood still and thought about it for a moment.

“Teddy couldn't help being the way he was,” she said, “but mean is mean, and no amount of nice can fix it.”

Mean is mean.
The words echoed in my head. Didn't my mother realize when she said that no amount of nice could fix what was wrong with Teddy, she might as well have been talking about me?

My summers had always revolved around spending time with Annie. As soon as school let out, we would put our heads together and come up with a project. One summer we made a fort, complete with curtains and real shingles on the roof. Another time we set up a little flower stand on the sidewalk in front of the post office and sold bouquets of Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans that we'd gathered in the big meadow behind Annie's house.

That summer between fifth and sixth grade, Annie and her new best friend, Heather, had decided to be junior counselors at a Y camp in the Poconos. Although I was relieved that I would be spared the sight of them whispering and giggling together for two whole months, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with myself without Annie to keep me company.

For the first few days of vacation I hung around at home reading and watching TV and not even bothering to get dressed. Sometimes, when I started feeling stir-crazy, I'd go out in the backyard and throw a ball for Jack.

Like all the dogs we ever had, Jack came to us from the shelter. Somebody had found him lying in the road. He was in terrible shape, his back left leg so badly broken Dr. Finn had to operate and take it off. When nobody showed up to claim him, my mother agreed to foster him at home, and he'd been ours ever since. He was a great dog, bighearted and friendly. His only shortcoming was a passion for chasing skunks, which meant there was a permanent stink to him that no amount of tomato juice or peppermint soap could get out. My father built him a doghouse out in the yard so he wouldn't smell up the house, but my mother always took pity on him and let Jack come inside anyway.

Ever since school had let out, my mother had been driving me crazy trying to come up with “fun” things we could do together—planting a rock garden, making strawberry jam—but I didn't feel like doing anything, especially not with her. Everything she did and said rubbed me the wrong way, and when she didn't let
up, I would lose my temper.

Sometimes I said hurtful things, sometimes I just yelled. I always felt bad afterward, but what did she expect? She'd said it herself: Mean is mean, and no amount of nice can fix it.

“Fourth of July's coming up, Verbie. Why don't we drive over to Pennsylvania and get some sparklers? We could pick up a couple of sandwiches at that wonderful little deli in Riley and eat lunch down by the river,” she suggested one day while she was unloading the dishwasher.

“I'm too old for sparklers,” I told her, biting at a hangnail on my thumb.

“Are you too old for ham and cheese too?” she teased.

“No, but what's the point of driving all the way to Pennsylvania to get a sandwich you could make for yourself in two minutes at home?”

“What about trying to line up some babysitting work?” she said. “Summer people are always looking for sitters, and I hear they pay very well.”

“I don't like babies,” I told her, “or flatlanders.”

“Verbena,”
my mother scolded, “you know how I feel about that word.”

Flatlander
was an unflattering term the locals used
to describe the summer people who came up to the Catskill Mountains from New York City to vacation. Flatlanders drove expensive cars, threw cash around like Monopoly money, and turned their noses up at the cheese selection in the deli case at Peck's. Nobody liked them, but everybody pretended to. My father said that was because people in Clydesdale knew which side their bread was buttered on.

“Everybody else calls them flatlanders,” I said. “Why shouldn't I?”

My mother pulled a fistful of clean silverware out of the dishwasher and carried it like a bouquet over to the drawer.

“Maybe Dr. Finn could find you something to do at the shelter,” she said, returning to the subject of my nonexistent summer plans. “I'm going over there tomorrow afternoon to see about a nest of bunnies somebody turned over with a mower. Poor little things got their ears—”

“Stop!” I cried, putting my hand up. “I don't want to hear about the bunnies.”

“There were five to begin with,” my mother said, closing the silverware drawer with her hip, “but only two are left.”

She reached into a box of cheese crackers that was
sitting open on the counter and popped a few into her mouth.

“I told you I didn't want to hear about the bunnies, Mom.”

I was sitting on the couch in the family room, off the kitchen, still in my nightgown. There were Sunday morning cartoons flickering on the television with the sound turned off. My mother came over and stood behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. There was orange cheese-cracker dust on her fingers.

“How about some pancakes—would that cheer you up?” she asked.

“I'm not hungry!” I shouted, shrugging out from under her touch. “And I'm not going to be hungry ten minutes from now when you ask me again, either.”

“You might feel better if you got some fresh air. Moping around in your pj's all day isn't going to help anything, Sugarpea.”

“I don't want to get some fresh air. I want to be left alone,” I said. “And how many more times do I have to tell you—
don't call me Sugarpea
.”

“I've called you that name since you were a baby, Verbena,” my mother said.

“Well in case you haven't noticed, I'm not a baby anymore.”

I was so mad I couldn't even look at her. Everything about my mother annoyed me, including her weight, which had ballooned to an all-time high. I knew it was mean, but the fact of the matter was I was embarrassed to even be seen with her. If only she would leave me alone. But no matter where I went, she always seemed to be hovering nearby asking me questions or trying to get me to eat something.

My father must have heard us arguing, because he appeared in the doorway, holding a wooden bird feeder in his hand.

“Everything all right in here, ladies?” he asked.

Sunday was his only day off, so he'd been out in his workshop happily hammering away all morning. He had a quiet way of tracking the storms between my mother and me without ever quite being drawn into them.

“Everything's fine,” my mother said. “We've just been talking about what Verbie might like to do with her free time this summer.”

“I could use a hand out in the shop. This feeder is about ready for a coat of paint, and there's a brush out there with a certain little girl's name on it.”

My mother wasn't the only one who could set me off.

“Little girl?”
I said.
“Little girl?”

My father looked to my mother, who turned her hands palms up.

I felt like the monkey in a game of monkey in the middle.

“I'm going up to my room to read,” I said, getting off the couch.

“Do you have a good book?” my mother asked, springing into full-blown fuss mode. “'Cause if you need one, we can go into town and swing by the library—no wait, it's not open today. We'll see if they have anything at Peck's instead—a paperback, or maybe you'd like a magazine. Afterward we can stop and get manicures. I'll give Trudy a call and see if she can fit us in.”

She reached for the phone, and before I could stop it, the lava overflowed inside me and I was yelling again.

“What's the matter with you? Are you crazy? I didn't say I wanted to go to town with you. Why would I want to go anywhere with you? Look at what you've got on. You look like you're wearing a tent. I guess that's what happens when you sit around all day eating cheese crackers.”

“That's no way to speak to your mother, young
lady,” my father said sternly. “You go up to your room this instant.”

“That's what I was trying to do in the first place,
remember
?” I said. Then I stormed upstairs to my room in a huff, slamming the door behind me so hard it made the walls shake.

 

My father was smart enough to retreat to his workshop out of the line of fire for the rest of that morning, but my mother couldn't help herself. Five minutes after I'd been sent to my room, she was upstairs telling me to come back down. I apologized to her for what I'd said. I was truly sorry. Not only for hurting her but for judging her as well. I knew better, but hard as I tried, I just couldn't seem to control my temper. My mother accepted my apology, but as soon as I got downstairs and settled in front of the television again, she started buzzing around me like a gnat.

“Can I get you anything? A glass of juice? Pancakes?”

“For the millionth time, Mom,” I told her,
“I'm not hungry.”

My mother frowned and put the back of her hand to my forehead.

“You feel a little warm,” she said. “I'll make you some Jell-O.”

I couldn't stand it any longer, so I turned off the television and went outside.

Jack was in his favorite spot, cooling his belly in the dirt under the clothesline. Crooking my pinkie, I slipped it between my lips and whistled. Jack lifted his head, wagged his tail, and struggled awkwardly to his feet. He could walk and run as well as any other dog, but with only three legs, getting up was kind of hard for him.

I whistled again and Jack came over, dipping his head and bumping my hand with his nose to try to get me to pet him.

“P.U.,” I said, waving my hand in front of my face. “No pats for you, Stinkerbell.”

A mourning dove flew by, landing with a clatter on a feeder hanging from the limb of a crabapple tree. There wasn't a tree in our yard that didn't have at least one of my father's bird feeders dangling from its branches. He always kept them filled—black oilers for the chickadees, doves, and nuthatches, thistle seed for the finches, and greasy blocks of glistening white suet for the jays and woodpeckers. He'd even made a squirrel feeder, with an ear of corn stuck on a post and a glass jar full of peanuts.

The garage door was open. Looking in at my bike,
I thought about taking a ride, but where would I go? Annie and I would sometimes ride down the hill into town to watch the volunteer firemen play softball behind the firehouse, but I didn't feel like doing that by myself.

I heard a car coming up the road. Dietz Road is a dead-end street, and since ours was the only house on it (except for the Allen house, which hadn't been occupied in years), I figured it was either one of my mother's nutty scrapbooking friends coming to swap stickers and rubber stamps or a customer wanting to talk to my dad about a job. I was surprised when, instead of turning into our driveway, the unfamiliar blue station wagon drove right past, kicking up dust and gravel behind it. A woman in dark sunglasses and a floppy hat with a wide brim gripped the wheel, staring straight ahead, and I caught a glimpse of a face pressed up against the glass in the backseat. For a split second I thought it was a dog, but then I realized it was a boy with reddish hair, the exact same color as Jack's fur.

When the car reached the end of the road, those people, whoever they were, would realize their mistake and have no choice but to turn around and come back down, I thought. But fifteen minutes later when the blue
station wagon still hadn't returned, I began to wonder if something had happened.

I hadn't bothered to get dressed yet that day, but I didn't feel like taking the time to go inside and change. Besides, I didn't want to risk another argument with my mother. I looked down at my nightgown, which was sleeveless and white, and decided that if you didn't know any better, you might mistake it for a sundress.

“Come on, Jackie boy,” I said, “Let's go.” Then I wheeled my bike out of the garage and, with Jack trotting along beside me, pedaled off up the road.