Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (41 page)

“Ask me if I care,” she said, then turned her attention back to Mikey. “But if we admit that you can't get the woman fired?”

Mikey nodded her head. She knew she couldn't.

“What would you settle for?”

“I never thought about that.”

“Think about it,” Katherine advised. “What's your bottom line here?”

“To play on the team?” suggested Margalo. A new way to think about problems always got her interest.

“And have everybody make good calls, no matter what any other team does.”

“That doesn't sound unreasonable,” Mr. Elsinger said.

“And Coach Sandy should apologize to me,” Mikey finished.

“I agree,” Katherine said. “But is that a requirement?”

Mikey considered this. “Yes,” she decided. “Because what if people think I just changed my mind about the calls or got talked out of it, like when you settle out of court. It's a little suspicious when people do that.”

“Often they do it to save the expense of a trial,” Mr. Elsinger pointed out.

“I know, but—”

“Or to avoid the risk of losing everything if the trial doesn't go well, if the other lawyer outlawyers yours,” Katherine said. “It's reasonable to choose a sure thing over a risk.”

“I know that, too,” Mikey said. “But if you really believe you're right, you shouldn't settle. Should you?”

“No matter how much money the settlement is?” Katherine asked.

Mikey shook her head. No, no matter how much. “Because if it's about money, then you might as well never have started the case.”

“Besides,” Margalo pointed out, “even if you do get a big cash award in a trial, don't the lawyers take an awful lot of it? And aren't those awards often overturned on appeal, because there are usually appeals. So you might not get anything if you were in it for the money.”

This argument improved Katherine's already happy mood. “You two,” she said, “I hope you're the wave of the future.”

Privately Margalo agreed with her, but she had to admit, “I don't think we are. At least not at school we aren't. Unless it's a very distant future.”

Katherine doubted this but said nothing. Mr. Elsinger expressed it in his usual unassertive way, as a question. “Do you think a wave of the future—Do you think it always knows what it is?”

“I think I can't figure out what anybody's talking about,” Mikey announced. “Except me, and I'm talking about how I'm not going to be playing on the tennis team for four years, which isn't such a terrific topic, if you ask me.”

“There's still the county league,” Mr. Elsinger said.

“You can teach my boys to play,” Katherine suggested, and
her face lit up at the possibility. “It would help everything if you did that, Mikey.”

Mikey looked at her father. He smiled reassuringly.

Katherine ignored this. “Seriously, it would. The boys aren't stupid, and they're worried about having a new sister, and an older one. They're not worried about a second dad, they know about fathers. Your father doesn't worry them, but you do sometimes. But if you were teaching them tennis—”

“We get along fine,” Mikey reassured her.

“I know that, but . . . You're always beating them. If you think about it, you win at Go Fish and Candy Land and War and when you run races of any kind, even when they have a head start. But what if you were helping them to learn how to do something?”

Mikey didn't mind helping the boys, and she also realized, “It would be good for my game, I bet. Sure, I'll try, if they want. But what will I do at school instead? I'm not going out for track,” she told them, as if they had been trying for hours to persuade her to do that.

“You'll do regular gym, like me,” Margalo suggested.

Suddenly Mikey scraped her chair backwards from the table and threw her napkin—hard—down on the floor. “I hate giving up!” she yelled, loud as a siren. She looked around at them all, bent to retrieve her napkin, drew her chair back in, and popped an asparagus spear into her mouth, apparently satisfied with the effect.

“But who said anything about giving up?” asked Katherine.

“You know the story about that book that won the Pulitzer?” Mr. Elsinger asked.

“
Confederacy of Dunces?
You should tell them,” Katherine said to Mr. Elsinger.

“If you want to hear it?” Mr. Elsinger asked Mikey and Margalo.

“If you want to tell it so badly,” Mikey said, and, “Yes,” said Margalo.

“It has to do with giving up. That's what made me think of it, because this young man, in his twenties, I think, he'd written a novel. A huge, long book, and original, too, unlike almost everything else. Publishers rejected it.”

“Well,” Katherine offered, “I don't blame them.”

“That isn't the issue.” Mr. Elsinger had the floor. “Eventually the young man killed himself. From what I remember, it was a very long time that he kept sending it out and getting it back, and it was just too discouraging for him.”

“You aren't worried that I'll kill myself, are you?” Mikey asked.

“I never thought of that. Do I have to think about it?” her father asked, ready to put some worrying energy into the question if it needed the attention.

“Just finish the story, Anders,” Katherine advised.

“His mother, the writer's mother, after his death she sent the manuscript to a well-known Southern writer—Did I say the young man was Southern? He was. Anyway, this other famous writer, he really liked the book. He liked it so much
he took it to his publisher and persuaded them to publish it. And it won the Pulitzer Prize.
A Confederacy of Dunces,
that's the name.”

“So what are you telling us?” Margalo asked. She knew it was Mikey's father's conversation with his daughter, but she was too interested to take a backseat.

“That he didn't have to give up,” Mikey said.

“Although it could be that his suicide made a good marketing point for the book when it came out,” Mr. Elsinger said, thinking out loud.

Margalo nodded. She could see what he meant. “Not that any of it made any difference to him,” she said. “Since he was dead. Which is a pretty important point.”

Mr. Elsinger nodded.

“If it had been me, I'd have written another book,” Katherine said. “It's just . . .
boring
if you don't keep trying.”

“That's what I mean, why throw your cards down on the table and quit the game?” Mr. Elsinger agreed.

“You just always do what you
can
do,” Katherine said. “Don't you think? You just keep on doing what you can—until . . . something changes? And sometimes it has to be you that changes, don't you think?”

Now they were talking just to each other, and Margalo looked at Mikey to see how she was taking this. Mikey didn't seem to find anything odd in this personal communication between her father and his . . . fiancée now, wasn't she? In fact, Mikey joined in.

“Like getting divorced,” she announced.

Both of the adults turned their heads and stared at her.

“I don't mean to say that getting thrown off the tennis team is that serious. I just mean
like,
similar to. When something bad happens, like marriages going bad. What people do about it—that's all I meant.”

Margalo reassured the two adults. “She's glad you're getting married.”

They turned to stare at her then.

“Honest,” Margalo assured them. “We really
are
talking about the tennis team. About Mikey being thrown off the tennis team. That's all.”

But Mr. Elsinger—who, after all, had been in therapy with Mikey and knew how important talking frankly was—said, “Except I sort of was talking about my divorce, because I did give up on the marriage. But I gave up on your mother, not on love.”

There was a silence, during which two of the people at the table—Margalo and Katherine—were a little uncomfortable.

Mikey said, “I'm not about to stop playing tennis, Dad.”

“Good,” Katherine said. “Now, I think I'll clear the table and serve dessert. Anders? You can help me. You girls sit. You've had a hard day. Save your strength for the dishes.”

Mikey and Margalo remained alone at the table. They didn't say anything and they didn't need to, since they both were thinking the same thing:
Not me, it's not going to happen to me, I'm not turning into any weird grown-up.

It took a little longer than necessary for Mr. Elsinger and Katherine to come out of the kitchen, bringing dessert plates, the apple pie, and a pint of vanilla ice cream, too, because Mr. Elsinger liked his desserts à la mode. Their cheeks were a little pink and their eyes were a little shiny, reminding Margalo of Sally and Richard coming back into the Drama room. At that thought she decided to concentrate on thinking about dessert.

For a while they ate without saying anything much. “Good pie,” said three of them, and, “Good ice cream,” said the fourth, everybody being particularly polite, the way people do when they want to make sure nobody at the table is upset with anybody else. Finally Mikey said, “I could look for a job. Like Margalo. Do you think they'd hire me at your restaurant?”

“You don't dislike the work?” asked Katherine.

“Just the pots and pans. And the cooking trays. But you know what I really like washing? The dough hook, it's about three feet long, and it's thick, heavy, really solid. It's like I'm washing a modern-art statue, the way it curves.” She described the curve with her hands. “And it's really heavy.”

“I know what you mean,” Mr. Elsinger said. “I feel the same way about mowing the grass. In my hands,” and he held up his hands to show her what he meant—which actually made sense to Margalo.

Mikey stuck to her point. “Would they hire me?”

“They might because it gets busier during the summer, when more people want to eat at restaurants.”

“Also, I think I'll start coming to your rehearsals.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To help out.”

“I don't need help. Also, it's not the kind of thing you're good at.”

“Maybe I can prove Richard and Sally stole your money.”

“Nobody is interested in my money. Nobody cares who did it.”

“What happened with your money?” Mr. Elsinger asked, and at the same time Katherine asked, “What money are you talking about?”

“I care,” Mikey said.

“Except maybe Hadrian,” Margalo said.

“Is anybody going to answer our question?” Mr. Elsinger demanded. So Margalo told them that sad story, from the beginning (at the bank, discovering she'd been robbed), through the middle (asking for advice, then help, then trying to solve the mystery on her own and finding out things she didn't want to know), to the end (when she got the envelope with two hundred dollars, but with nobody being held responsible).

“Aurora must have been in a tizzy,” said Mr. Elsinger.

So Margalo had to explain that she hadn't told her parents, and why, and that she didn't want to. It wasn't that important, she said, and besides, what could they do now except feel bad? “Like you are,” Margalo pointed out.

This caused another thoughtful silence. They had finished
eating, so all they could do was poke forks around on their dessert plates, scraping up the last sweet crumbs, the last moist lickings.

“Then you
will
tell your restaurant I want to apply for a job?” Mikey asked Margalo.

Mr. Elsinger asked, “Is that it? Is that everything we should know about?”

Mikey and Margalo decided without any consultation to spare Mr. Elsinger and Katherine Ronnie's story. Ronnie's story was the kind that would
really
get parents going.

“Of course not,” Mikey said, and, “There's lots more,” Margalo offered.

“Don't you remember ninth grade?” Mr. Elsinger asked Katherine. He reached over to take her hand. “There was always something else in ninth grade.”

“Don't remind me,” she said, clutching his hand with both of hers at the memory.

When Mr. Elsinger had left her off, before taking Katherine home, Margalo went slowly around the side of the house to her back door, taking a couple of minutes on her own in the mild early darkness of a spring night. At this time of year eight-thirty held the promise of summer nights, with the sun setting later and later, and the dark coming on more slowly. Through the open window to the bedroom she shared with Esther came a faint sound of music—some new band, she couldn't keep up with Esther's music fads. A country-and-western
song from the neighbor's house dueled with Esther's band. Light from the kitchen windows lit the narrow sidewalk. She thought she could hear the TV and tried to remember what Steven liked to watch on Tuesdays, but then she wasn't sure she could hear it after all.