The Book of One Hundred Truths
Read The Book of One Hundred Truths Online
Authors: Julie Schumacher
For my mother, Winifred Temple Schumacher,
who taught me to love the ocean and the written word
Thanks to all who assisted in the creation of this book:
My editor, the indefatigable Jodi Keller (Congratulations on your wedding!)
My agent, Lisa Bankoff, and her daughter Charlotte Ruth Simms
My husband, Lawrence Jacobs, the most optimistic political scientist in North America
My daughters—Emma, who took pen in hand to notice what others had overlooked; and Bella, who loyally championed the first version of the manuscript but is willing to stand by the revised copy also
Alison McGhee, dearest friend and reader
The miraculous members of Women Who Wine, who offer encouragement and hilarity and solace, and who will find themselves inscribed, with the author’s gratitude, within these pages
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CHAPTER ONE
P
robably because they didn’t trust me, my parents were grilling me at the airport in Minneapolis, asking all the usual travel questions. Did I have my backpack?
Yes.
Did I have the claim check for my suitcase?
Yes.
Did I need to use the bathroom?
“Guess what? They have bathrooms on planes now,” I said.
My father patted his pockets. “Do you need any chewing gum?”
“I already have some.”
“A bottle of water?”
“Dad,” I said. “This is kind of insulting.”
“Okay, I’ll stop. A magazine?”
Every summer since I was six years old, my parents had been sending me to visit my father’s relatives at the beach in New Jersey. They were always more anxious about it than I was. I liked eating lunch on the plane at thirty thousand feet, and I liked staying at my grandparents’ house, which was full of lumpy, mismatched furniture and old-fashioned wallpaper that would have been seriously ugly anywhere else.
Yes,
I said. I had a magazine. I had absolutely everything that a person going on a plane could possibly want.
But then my mother cleared her throat, opened a shopping bag I hadn’t noticed, and offered me a notebook. It was light blue, with thick, heavy unlined paper—a much nicer notebook than the kind I used at school.
“What’s that for?” I felt uneasy. I was already bringing a lot of things with me: a gift for my grandparents, a lunch and some junk food, my CD player and a dozen CDs, and several books that my father insisted I would want to read.
“It’s a notebook of truths,” my mother said. She flipped the pages of the notebook and held it toward me. “You can write anything you want in here, as long as every single thing you write is true.”
“What do you mean,
every single thing
?” I looked at the notebook but didn’t touch it. On its cover was a white star about the size of my fingertip. All around us, people were pushing strollers and dragging suitcases toward their gates.
“Well, I’m not talking about essays, or even paragraphs,” my mother said. She was standing very close to me; I could smell peppermint on her breath. “I’m only talking about observations. Write a few sentences at first. You can make a list.”
“Gee. A list.” I shifted my backpack to my other shoulder. “That sounds exciting.”
My mother didn’t appreciate sarcasm. “Notebooks are private,” she went on. I was almost exactly her height, and she was looking at me forehead to forehead, eye to eye. “That’s the best thing about them. You can write down any truths at all. Anything you’re thinking.”
“The world is round,” I said. “How’s that for a truth?”
My mother tucked her hair behind her ears and said that
the world is round
was a fact instead of a truth, and that there was a difference. She said she suspected I knew what it was.
“Time to get on that plane,” my father said. He clapped his hands.
Here was a truth: my father didn’t like goodbyes. He didn’t like train stations or bus depots or airports. I could tell he was nervous by the way he had been jingling the change in his pockets.
A tall blond woman ran over my foot with her rolling suitcase.
“We have one more minute,” my mother said. She straightened the sleeve of my T-shirt and pulled me aside. “You’ll be gone for three weeks. Twenty-two days. If you write down four or five
true things
every day”—she tapped the cover of the notebook—“you’ll have a hundred. A hundred true things.”
“A hundred,” I repeated. I had to admit that
one hundred truths
had a certain ring to it.
“You’ll feel better if you use this,” my mother said. “You never know what you might discover. You might learn something new.” Her green eyes were like matching traffic lights. “You might find out something new about who you are.”
I didn’t want to get into that kind of discussion. I took the notebook. It felt good in my hands; the blue cover was soft.
“Off you go, then,” my father said. He gave my ticket to the flight attendant, who wrapped a paper bracelet around my wrist as if I were two years old instead of almost thirteen.
I started down the carpeted hallway and waved. My parents, their arms around each other’s shoulders, waved back.
“We’ll see you soon,” my father said. “Call us when you get there. And have a good time. Behave yourself.”
I told him I would.
But I should probably mention something right now, before this story goes any further: my name is Theodora Grumman, and I am a liar.
CHAPTER TWO
A
bout three and a half hours later, I was in the backseat of my aunt Celia’s car, on the way to my Nenna and Granda’s house in Port Harbor, New Jersey. My aunt Celia and my aunt Ellen—two of my father’s four sisters—had signed for me as if I were a package when I got to the airport in Philadelphia. Now we were cruising down a narrow ribbon of road, my aunts arguing about the speed of the car, the amount of oil it was probably burning, and whether the warm air rushing through the windows would slow us down. Celia was driving, which meant that it was Ellen’s job to criticize.
Another truth for my notebook: some of my father’s relatives were crazy. They didn’t chase each other around the house with carving knives, but they had what my Nenna called habits or quirks. My mother was an only child, like me, and she said that the polite word for people like my aunts was
eccentric.
“What are you writing back there?” Celia asked. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. She and Ellen were both large and sturdy, with gray-blue eyes. They looked like meat packers, my father said. Celia worked as a hotel manager, and Ellen was the principal at an elementary school. I felt sorry for all the kindergartners she probably terrified every September.
“Nothing.” I zipped up my backpack and put it on the floor of the car by my feet.
“You were writing something. I saw you. In a little blue notebook.”
“I don’t have a notebook,” I said.
In front of me, in the passenger seat, my aunt Ellen twitched. Her neck was tan and as thick as a column.
I sniffed at the air pouring in through the window, but there was no beach smell yet. My grandparents—Nenna and Granda—lived right on the ocean, and every summer when I went to visit, I tried to pinpoint the moment when the smell of farmland and manure gave way to salt and water. As soon as I smelled it, I felt I was up to my ankles in hot soft sand, the ocean spread out in front of me like a living blanket.
“Can I have the back bedroom again?” I asked. “The one with the porch?” I always slept in the back bedroom. It was small, and I had to walk through my grandparents’ room to reach it, but I thought it was the nicest room in the house. It was shaped like the letter
L,
and instead of beds, it had two berths in it, like hammocks, that clipped to the wall when no one was using them. My Granda liked to sleep in them sometimes, before he got too old. He said it reminded him of being in the navy.
“No, sorry, you can’t. It’s already spoken for,” Celia said. “We’ve got a full house this summer.”
“What do you mean, a full house?” Even though my grandparents’ house filled up with relatives on Saturdays and Sundays, weekdays were usually slow and lonely. I’d been looking forward to that kind of loneliness—to spending time by myself without anyone prodding me or saying, “Why don’t you get up off that couch and call a friend?”
A truck was coming toward us in the opposite lane. Celia jerked her elbow up and down; the truck driver honked. “What I mean, Thea,” she said, chewing on a toothpick, “is that Liam and Austin have the back bedroom. They got here first.”
“Liam and Austin? Why are they sleeping over?” Liam and Austin were my aunt Ellen’s sons, fifteen and seventeen—my oldest cousins. Their father had died when they were little, and they lived with my aunt Ellen about ten miles away from my Nenna and Granda.
“Because both of them are working at the hoagie shop this summer—the Breakers,” Ellen said. “If they sleep at home, I’ll have to drive them to work every day. But if they stay at your Nenna and Granda’s, they can walk up the street.”
We drove past some cornfields, a fruit and honey stand, and half a dozen signs for Jersey’s finest tomatoes.
“So I guess that means I’ll be in the middle room,” I said. “The one with the seashell wallpaper.”
There were four bedrooms on the second floor of my grandparents’ house: one belonged to my Nenna and Granda; one was Celia’s (she was older than my father but had never left home); and the one with the porch and the swinging berths was now Liam and Austin’s. I didn’t like the seashell room as much, but I supposed if it was the only one left (my parents were always telling me that I should be flexible), it was mine.
Celia adjusted her rearview mirror so she could see me. “Actually, the seashell room is going to be Edmund’s this year,” she said.
“Edmund’s?”
Edmund was another cousin, my aunt Trisha’s four-year-old son. He and his seven-year-old sister, Jocelyn, masqueraded as the world’s most well-behaved children. They said please and thank you about every two minutes. I remembered that the summer before, Jocelyn had told me that her favorite thing in the world was making beds. “Then where am I supposed to sleep?” I asked.
“Upstairs. Up on the third floor,” Ellen said.
A sprinkler the size of a football field crept like a long-legged robot through the furrows of dirt beside the road.
“The only problem with that idea,” I said slowly, “is that
there is no third floor.
Do you mean the attic?” The last time I’d been in my Nenna and Granda’s attic, it had been full of moths. Every step sent a ragged little cloud of them up from the carpet. They were like feathery halos around my feet.
“Don’t worry, we fixed it up. It looks much better now,” Celia said. “Oops.” She jerked her elbow up and down for another truck. “We tore out the rugs, for starters. And cleared out some boxes and other whatnot. It’s a little warm up there, I guess, but it isn’t infested anymore. You’ll be sharing it with Jocelyn.”
“I wouldn’t have used the word
infested,
” Ellen said. “Would you please keep both of your hands on the wheel?”
“Wait a minute.” I clutched the back of the driver’s seat. “Did you say I have to share a room with Jocelyn?”
Ellen opened the glove compartment and started sifting through it. “This is a mess, Celia,” she said. “Why do you have all these take-out menus? You don’t actually eat at the Chicken Hut?”
I could feel my vacation being yanked out from under my feet. I didn’t want to share a bedroom. Ever since I was six weeks old, I had had a room of my own. “Why are Jocelyn and Edmund staying over?” I asked. My parents and I were the only members of the family who didn’t live near my Nenna and Granda. We slept at their house when we visited; everyone else could visit for the day.
“Their parents dropped them off,” Ellen said. “They’re in Europe. Trisha’s leading a tour.” My aunt Trisha was a travel agent.
“They’re willing to pay you to do some babysitting,” Celia said. “What did we decide on, Ellen? I don’t remember. Two dollars an hour?”
“Two and a half or three,” Ellen said. She took a rubber band from her wrist (she usually wore half a dozen) and fastened a stack of paper from the glove compartment together. “Mainly we’re talking about afternoons. I think we’ve got the mornings covered. It’ll be a good opportunity for you to—”
“Actually, I’m not allowed to babysit.” The words came up from my throat before I knew what I was going to say. Lies were that easy. They slid past me like butter. “My parents don’t let me.”
Silence filled the front seat, as if someone had pumped it in through the air vents.
“They don’t let you?” Ellen asked.
“I’m irresponsible,” I said. “I might be a danger to myself or others.”
“Your father didn’t mention that on the phone,” Ellen said. “I don’t remember that he—”
“Leave it, Ellen.” Celia stopped at a light. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“Well, you know we need someone to keep an eye on—”
“Leave it.”
Celia stepped on the gas and the car jerked forward. “We should be there in about twenty minutes, Thea.”
“Thirty. And it would be nice if we got there all in one piece,” Ellen sniffed.
“Please shut up, Ellen,” Celia said.
Ellen snapped the glove compartment closed, then rearranged the rubber bands on her wrist.
I leaned back against the seat and fell asleep to the sound of them quarreling, a back-and-forth as predictable as the tide.