What I Saw and How I Lied

Chapter 34

We were packed and on the road by noon. It was a long way home, and a long way to go without talking. Grandma Glad and I shared the backseat, keeping a careful distance, even when we slept. She sat with her feet planted on either side of her brown valise, and she never moved or com­plained, even when the sweat dripped off her nose onto her bust. She wouldn't talk to Mom, and Mom wouldn't talk to her, and I didn't know if Joe and Mom were talk­ing to each other.

The miles ticked off under the car wheels. The weather got cooler, and we had to dig for sweaters. We never looked at each other. We looked at Georgia and South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. Maryland. Delaware. New Jersey.

When nobody looked at you, it made it so easy to feel like you'd disappeared.

All the way on the drive, I just wanted to get home, but when we got there on Saturday morning, there was something that made me and Mom both stop in the driveway and look up at the house, hesitate about going in. I'd been thinking of my room, and my bed, and the white bedspread, and my own pillow. I hadn't been thinking that I was going back to Grandma Glad's house, a place that had never really been mine.

Mom and I looked at each other, really looked at each other, for the first time since Florida. Then she gave a little tilt to her head and shrugged. She picked up her suitcase and walked up the path. I remembered the night in the car when she'd tilted the rearview mirror and put her lipstick on. How she made herself do it.

Being an adult — was this it? Doing the thing you most in your life didn't want to do, and doing it with a shrug?

I picked up my suitcase and followed her. Grandma Glad was already on the porch, her hand tightly gripping her valise. Joe slipped the key into the lock. We stepped into the dark hall. Every house has a smell, but you can't smell it if it's your own home. I could smell Grandma Glad's house.

Grandma Glad went up the stairs and I followed her. She turned into her room and I stopped, waiting. I peeked through the door. She stood, looking around for a minute, then opened the closet door and put the valise on the top shelf, grunting while she did it. As she closed the closet I scooted down to my room next door.

I hadn't even finished unpacking when Margie arrived. Thanks, no doubt, to Mrs. Clancy's gossip know-how. I knew as soon as she saw our car that she'd pick up the phone.

I could see in a moment what Margie wanted, how greedily she greeted me, how her eyes swept over my hair and my figure.

"Tell me everything," she said dramatically. "It was in the paper here, you know. My mother said it was an ordeal for your stepfather. An ordeal, she said. But then you said it was you all along who loved him. An older man!"

I felt my lips close. There weren't any words I wanted to use to talk to Margie.

She had been my best friend for six years. There were all of the secrets we'd whispered, sweaters we'd borrowed, homework we'd done together at her kitchen table. I'd been practically adopted by her mother, brought into family dinners and stickball games, hoeing their Victory Garden, washing their big old '39 Ford with Margie on sunny Saturday afternoons.

I didn't want to be her friend anymore.

She settled herself on my bed and smoothed out her skirt. "You can tell me," she said. She lifted her face to me, all expectation. She would have the gossip before anyone.

It would certainly increase my standing in the cafeteria. I would no longer hover there with my tray, looking for an empty seat. Girls would slide over to make room for me. For us. Margie would be by my side, the interpreter of what had happened to me. I could see her mouth moving, I could see it all, my story served up on a tray with the grilled cheese.

Now I have a story, Peter.

"I don't want to talk about it," I said.

"But—"

"I have to unpack." I said the words so curtly that she reared back, her cheeks red.

"Well, honestly! You don't have to be so rude!"

I reached over and took a blue skirt out of the suit­case. I smoothed it and put it on the hanger carefully. By the time I hung it up, Margie had gone.