Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living (2 page)

At the new year in Greece, Sally says, people throw a pomegranate on the floor. If it smashes into lots of little pieces, that means good luck. We should have done that, she said.

I think it's a good thing we didn't. It would have been too depressing.

It probably would have bounced.

George thinks Persephone is a great part, even with the toilet paper. He has been in two plays in kindergarten. In one of them he played the letter B, and in the other he was a toadstool. Jonah says he was particularly good at the toadstool because it is difficult to play a fungus with distinction.

It must be nice to be five.

George has a picture book of the myth of Persephone from the library and he made me read it to him twice while Sally and Jonah were out in the kitchen, giggling and doing the dishes. It begins with Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter, Persephone, picking daisies in a meadow. Demeter is fat and pink and cheerful-looking and has a basket full of fruit and stuff. Persephone is blond and looks like Emily Harris.

Then Persephone wanders out of her mother's sight and the minute she does, Hades, looking a bit like Elvis Presley, pops out of the ground in a black chariot pulled by big black horses and he grabs her and gallops off with her to the Underworld, which is dark and gloomy and looks like a basement. Persephone hates it there, even though Hades loads her with jewelry and makes her his queen. Aboveground, Demeter is miserable too. She loses weight, her hair turns gray, and she cries all the time and forgets about the harvest, so everybody in the world is starving and it's always winter.

Finally they strike a deal: Persephone can go back home, provided she hasn't eaten any of the Underworld food. But it turns out she's nibbled these pomegranate seeds. So she can only go home for half the year. The rest of the time she has to spend with Hades.

The last page of the book shows Persephone running out of a cave laughing, and her mother is laughing, and everything is sunshine and lambs. George loves that. He doesn't seem to worry about the fact that in just a little while she'll be headed right back down to hell again.

George's mother is dead. She was killed in a car crash when George was two.

George thinks she's been turned into a star. She's up in the sky, he thinks, twinkling at him.

A Christmas package just arrived from my father and Kim. It's late because they weren't around for the holidays. They were skiing in Austria. They sent a picture that shows them standing in front of a ski chalet with their arms around each other, wearing goggles and forest-green ski suits and clunky boots that look like the sort of boots the astronauts wore on the moon. They're both very tan, and Kim is wearing purple lipstick.

If Elvis Presley dragged me off to the Underworld, nobody would care. My father has Kim. Sally would miss me for a while, but now she has Jonah and George. Even Ginger and Sam only like me because I let them sleep on my pillow.

I told Sally this and she said not to be ridiculous. She said she would be very jealous if I were kidnapped by Elvis Presley.

Then she borrowed the Duck Monkeys.

Last year today was Purple Feathered Hat Day. It was Sally's and my private and personal holiday.

Sally started it because I hated going to school because nobody liked me there and last year it was a lot worse because everybody was talking behind my back about my father and Kim. That's the worst part of living in a small town. There's no privacy. Everybody always knows everything about everybody else, like who's got false teeth and who doesn't pay their bills and who backed their car into the streetlight pole on Second Street and who left all those beer bottles in the park and who just moved to California with a giggly blond tennis player who has boobs the size of cantaloupes. I don't know which was worse, the kids who were mean about it or the teachers who were sympathetic and wanted to know how I was doing, dear. Anyway, I was feeling really bad, so Sally started Purple Feathered Hat Day.

We went to Burlington, just the two of us, and we bought these crazy purple hats covered with sequins and glitter and feathers in a gift shop — the silly kind of gift shop that sells stuff like earrings shaped like lizards and Mexican jumping beans and puddles of ink made out of plastic. Then we put them on and we went to a fancy restaurant for lunch where we had all the courses — appetizers and soups and entrées, and then chocolate cheesecake for dessert — and Sally let me have sips of wine from her glass when the waiter wasn't looking. The waiter was named Bernard and he had a curly mustache.

Then we went to the bookstore because Sally says that no one can be totally miserable when they're reading a really good book, so we bought some, and then we sang songs in the car all the way home.

This year Sally didn't even remember about Purple Feathered Hat Day.

Anyway she doesn't have time anymore.

She's always busy doing something with Jonah.

The only person at school who is weirder than I am is Horace Zimmerman. Horace's father teaches Latin at a private boys' school over in New York, and his mother works at an art gallery in Burlington. They are both tall and skinny and whispery, like a pair of very well-educated giraffes.

Horace is tall and skinny too, but not whispery at all. Horace is a political activist. He believes in causes. He is always putting up signs or asking people to sign petitions or having loud terrible arguments over the nature of justice or the dangers of global warming or the solution to world hunger. He once got sent to the principal's office for getting in a fight with Jason Dobbs about the spotted owl. And last semester he lay down in front of a bulldozer to protest filling in the wetlands to make a parking lot for the new supermarket, but that didn't work out very well because it was the wrong bulldozer.

Horace thinks that if people try hard enough, they can make a difference, but I think Horace is full of crap. I think things just happen to you and then you're stuck with them. Like Kim.

Horace and I have a lot of time to talk at rehearsals because we are the only god and goddess in the play who know their lines. So far we have discussed world hunger, the destruction of mountain habitats, and tattoos. Emily Harris has a butterfly tattoo on her ankle. Sally won't let me get a tattoo. She says you shouldn't do anything to your body that you wouldn't want to show to a board of directors when you're 38, divorced, and applying for a job.

Horace says Andrea is wrong about lists. A list, says Horace, is a first step toward attaining one's life goals. Horace can sometimes be very pompous.

He is going to check these off as he accomplishes, visits, or solves them.

In English class today, our vocabulary word for the day was
pulchritude.
Ronnie Pincus thought it had something to do with chickens, but it does not.

Pulchritude is something that I do not have. Emily Harris does. She looks good even in a pillowcase. That's what we're all wearing for the play. Tunics made out of pillowcases. In her pillowcase, Emily looks like a fashion model. She has this very tiny waist, like Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone with the Wind.
I have no waist at all. In my pillowcase, I look like an orange cow that got tangled in a roll of toilet paper.

All through rehearsal today, I kept thinking about
Anne of Green Gables,
which is one of my favorite books. I love Anne because she uses her imagination all the time and because she has awful orange hair too. There's a part in the book where Anne tries to decide which she would rather be: divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good. Anne could never make up her mind. But I know which one I'd be. I'd be divinely beautiful.

Sally says it's what you are, not what you look like, that's important, but that's the sort of thing mothers say when they're trying to make you feel better. If Sally really thinks that, she's totally whacked.

If you're beautiful enough, you can always get what you want.

Look at Kim.

Horace Zimmerman looks even worse than I do in a pillowcase. It makes him look like a marshmallow on stilts.

Emily Harris is the captain of the Pelham Prancers. That is the girls' field hockey team. All the field hockey players wear white T-shirts and little maroon plaid pleated skirts and maroon kneesocks. Emily Harris looks so good in that little pleated skirt that she once made some high-school boys in a pickup truck drive into a ditch.

It is a good thing that I don't play field hockey because I know what I would look like in that pleated skirt.

I would look like an orange cow.

Horace says wanting to be divinely beautiful is an unworthy ambition. He thinks everybody should try to be angelically good. Then people would be nicer to each other, and the world would be a better place.

Also Horace says there's nothing wrong with orange hair. Lots of famous people have had orange hair. Like Thomas Jefferson and Queen Elizabeth I.

I hate Valentine's Day. It's nice for the people who are running around being in love, but a lot of people aren't, and how do you think it makes them feel?

It makes them feel lousy.

Last year on Valentine's Day, which was after my father left but before Sally met Jonah, Andrea came over and we had pizza and then Sally and Andrea watched
Alien
because Sally said she wanted to watch a movie in which everybody dies except the woman and the cat.

This year Jonah and George came over with a sort of pizza they'd made themselves that was supposed to be shaped like a heart but actually looked like a giant tadpole with cheese. Jonah brought a box of chocolates for everybody and a big bouquet of roses for Sally and then we watched
The Goodbye Girl,
in which Marsha Mason has been dumped by every man she's ever known until she and her adorable little daughter meet Richard Dreyfuss, who is kind and funny and truly loves her. By the time we got to the happy ending, I was wishing for an acid-dripping monster to leap out from under the bed.

George brought his valentines over to show me. He got seventeen because that's how many other kids there are in his class and his teacher insists that everyone be fair. I think that is a huge mistake. Love isn't fair. They might as well learn that now.

Jonah's dead wife was named Jenny. I heard all about her one day last fall when I was sitting on the stairs reading a library book and Jonah was talking to Sally in the living room.

Her car got hit by a truck when she was on her way home from work. There was freezing rain, and this huge truck just skidded across the road and smashed into her. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. Jonah said his whole life changed then, just in a few seconds. He said he wanted to die too. He said he might have if it hadn't been for George.

I knew what he meant about your whole life changing just in a few seconds.

Last year on New Year's Day, when my father said good-bye, everything turned upside down forever. It was as if there was one life before the good-bye and another life after it, and once you moved into the after-good-bye life, you couldn't ever get back, no matter how hard you tried.

Ryan Matthews, whose mother is a physicist, says that every time someone makes a decision, everything splits into parallel universes. There's a universe in which my father left and a universe in which he decided not to. There's a universe in which Jenny got hit by the truck and one in which the truck missed her.

What I don't understand is why I have to be stuck in this universe. I'd rather be in the other one, the one without Kim.