I fought back the urge to turn and curse her, to shout that I didn’t care and just run.
“You two get to your rooms now!” she snapped at Barbara Ann and Jake.
They hurried away.
“Smoking, and in my house, in my house! Don’t you know how bad it is not only for you but for the people who smell your smoke, especially younger people like Barbara Ann and Jake? Don’t you know that?”
“It was just two puffs of one cigarette with the window wide open,” I said sullenly.
“Don’t tell me that it was just this or just that. Just tike you can’t be a little pregnant, you can’t be a little bad, girl. It’s like a cancer. You don’t cut it out right away, it will consume and destroy you. That’s what the minister said last Sunday.”
“That must have been a very long sermon last Sunday,” I muttered.
Finally, Uncle Buster emerged and shook his head.
“Nothing else there,” he said.
“You sure, Buster? You look good?”
“Go see for yourself, Mae Louise,” he told her, and she stepped up to the bedroom door. Then she turned back to me.
“Get that room looking like it was and then you come out and do the dishes and don’t dare drop anything. We’ll talk about what this cigarette in the bathroom means tomorrow. Your daddy is going to be very disappointed if I tell him. Not here a day and you already break one of the rules. I’m not surprised.”
She stepped back, and I looked in the room. The bed had been turned over, the mattress on the floor. The two pillowcases, the bed sheet, and the comforter had been stripped away and tossed about. All the drawers were emptied, my panties, bras, stockings thrown to the floor. Every garment I had brought was dangling over a chair or over the edge of the bed, especially my bras and my panties.
I shook my head.
“This is sick,” I said. “What did he do, get excited over my clothes?”
“Don’t you be disrespectful. Clean it up,” Aunt Mae Louise ordered again.
I went in and began to put things back. Ten minutes later, she returned and handed me a pamphlet.
“What’s this?”
“This is from the church. It tells young people why smoking is bad for them and why the devil himself wants you to light up. You read it and memorize it. Starting tomorrow night at dinner, I want to hear the first page.”
“What?” I squinted. “That’s—”
“You do what I tell you, Phoebe. I’m taking on my sister’s responsibility and I intend to do it right. You read and memorize that. That’s how you’ll earn your right to eat,” she declared, and left.
I looked at the pamphlet. Memorize? Right to eat? I’d rather starve, I thought, and tossed it to the floor.
Almost an hour later, she came by again and told me to look after the dishes.
“I’ll be checking them so be sure there are no spots and smudges after you wipe them clean and put them back. There’s polish and a rag on the counter. Do the dining room table after that, and I want the floor vacuumed.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
She smiled at my quick comeback.
“Why, I’m going to pray for you, Phoebe, pray for you every night, and so will your Uncle Buster and your cousins.”
“I don’t know how to thank you all,” I said.
She stood silent a moment and then in a cold, hard voice said, “I won’t mention any of this to your father if you do everything I’ve told you to do. We expected a crisis or two with you. We just didn’t expect it so soon, but I’m not about to give up on you. That is what you should be thankful for,” she concluded, turned, and left again.
I wondered if Ashley Porter had it any worse when he got home today.
I did all she wanted me to do. While I was vacuuming, the phone rang and she came into the dining room to tell me my daddy was on the phone.
“I kept my promise,” she said. “I didn’t tell him what you did. He’s waiting to talk to you. Go in the kitchen and pick up the phone.”
I set aside the vacuum cleaner and did as she asked.
“Hey,” Daddy said after I said hello. “How’s it going?”
My throat closed up.
“Phoebe?”
“Fine,” I managed. What was the point in complaining? He would only moan and groan about how helpless he was until things changed.
“It’s a good school, isn’t it?”
“Terrific,” I said dryly.
“All well with Aunt Mae Louise? She seemed okay.”
“Daddy,” I said. “Don’t call me or come here until you can get me home.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Daddy. I am never going to be happy here. There’s no sense pretending on the telephone.”
“Now don’t go and do anything stupid, Phoebe. You have a court record. Your mother’s nothing more than a tramp, and I don’t have the means to do what has to be done for you at the moment. You listening to me?”
“No,” I said, tears finally rushing into my eyes, tears I had no time to trap beneath my lids. I flicked them off my cheeks as fast as they came.
“I’m working at this, Phoebe. I’ll find a way. That’s a promise,” he said. “Be a good girl. Please,” he begged.
“I gotta go, Daddy. I’ve got to finish my chores or I’ll be locked in the basement.”
“Phoebe?”
“Thanks for calling,” I said, and hung up.
Aunt Mae Louise was standing right behind me in the doorway to the dining room. I knew she had been listening in.
“Didn’t think you’d make it easy for him,” she said. “Just go do whatever schoolwork you have. I’ll finish up.”
I walked out without saying a word. As I passed Barbara Ann’s room, I looked in and saw her stuffing a chocolate bar in her mouth.
“I wonder what your mother would say if I told her about that,” I said.
She stopped and looked terrified.
“That’s the difference between us, Barbara Ann. I don’t rat. I bet you don’t have any friends, do you?”
“I do too.”
“They would have to be fellow rats.” I shook my head and went on to my room.
It wasn’t too hard to fall asleep. The moment I crawled into bed, I realized how tired I was. I didn’t want to think about my situation anymore so instead I looked forward to drifting off. The next thing I knew Barbara Ann was in my face to tell me Aunt Mae Louise wanted me up and about to help with breakfast, clear the table afterward, and take out the garbage.
“And Mama says you’d better have this room looking like it was before you go to school,” she added, wagging her head.
“Get outta here before I turn your fat ears around,” I warned her through clenched teeth.
Her eyes brightened with terror and she ran from my room. For a moment I just lay there wondering if I should simply refuse to do everything and get thrown out. Reluctantly, I rose, washed, and dressed in a pair of jeans and a blouse over which I put on a sweater I had lifted from the same department store I had been caught stealing from last month.
“Squeeze those oranges,” Aunt Mae Louise ordered as soon as I appeared. “Your uncle Buster likes fresh juice every morning, and make sure you get out every drop. That’s expensive.”
Still half asleep, I did it, but she had to show me I had left some juice in every single orange.
“A penny wasted is a penny lost,” she recited.
After I served Uncle Buster his juice, I got a lecture on how poorly I ate and why breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Aunt Mae Louise came to my room to inspect it after I had made my bed and went about criticizing everything: how I hung up my clothes, how loosely I had left the cover sheet, how I didn’t fluff out the pillow correctly, on and on until I pointed out that I would miss the school bus.
“Don’t forget to take out the garbage on the way out,” she called after me.
I returned to the kitchen, got the bag, and dumped it in the can.
Barbara Ann was standing on the corner, embracing her books and talking to two other kids who looked about her age. They all turned as I approached, their eyes obviously brightened by the stories Barbara Ann had told them about me.
“Boo!” I said, and they jumped.
When I stepped up on the bus, I noticed immediately that Ashley Porter was sitting alone. He smiled and I slid in beside him.
“You survived, I see,” he said.
“Barely. What about you?”
“My father took away my driving privileges, not that I had that much. Both he and my mother work and use their cars all day, six days a week. They let me use my mother’s car Saturday nights and Sundays, but that’s gone. I’m supposed to come right home after school, blah, blah,” he said. “And you?”
“I gotta break a pile a rocks in the backyard with a sledgehammer.”
He laughed and then asked me more about myself, about my school in the city and my friends. We talked so much, neither of us realized we were at the school until the driver opened the door.
“Maybe I’ll see you at lunch,” he said as we walked off the bus.
“I don’t even know when that is. I came in after lunch yesterday and they keep us in that room.”
He paused at the front door.
“Tell you what,” he said; “Get sick about eleven-thirty. The nurse’s name is Mrs. Fassbinder, and she’s easy. You tell her you have cramps or something like girls have all the time and she’ll let you lie down. I’ll be there, too.”
“What good’s that?” I asked him.
“You’ll see,” he said with a twinkle in his eye, and left for his homeroom.
Armed with the results of my reading test from yesterday, Mr. Cody greeted me eagerly.
“I feel certain that you suffer from a learning disorder we call dyslexia, Phoebe.”
I grimaced.
“What’s that mean?”
“Well, the short explanation is that you confuse letters or words and write and read words or sentences in the wrong order. This doesn’t have anything to do with your intelligence, which I believe is above average,” he said.
Was that just to make me feel good? I wondered.
“It still sounds sick,” I said.
“More people than you know suffer from dyslexia, Phoebe. Why, Tom Cruise was diagnosed with it, and he hasn’t done so badly for himself, has he?”
I looked suspicious.
“Go read about him. You’ll see. I don’t want to get too technical with you. It’s not necessary. You have a problem that affects your reading ability, and that has a big impact on your ability to learn, which would explain why you don’t do well in subjects that require a lot of reading. No one wants to do something they keep failing at, so they avoid it, get discouraged. It explains a lot,” he said in a voice a little above a whisper as if he and I were now sharing a very important secret.
“So?” I said.
“I’m surprised the teachers, evaluators in your previous school didn’t concentrate on this problem for you.”
“I’m not,” I said.
If I told him how many days of school I had missed, especially when I was in grade school and Mama was either too tired or hungover to take me, he might understand, I thought. Later, in high school, my teachers were happy if I just didn’t give them any trouble. They left me alone and I left them alone, when I was in class.
“Well, we’re going to attack the problem and help you here,” he vowed. “I know I can make progress with you very quickly,” he said.
“You mean I’ll get outta here, out of this classroom?”
“Sooner than you think, if you work hard at what I give you,” he promised.
He put me on some reading machine that included a screen on which words were printed, a pair of earphones, and a microphone for me to read into. It also checked my understanding of what I read periodically. I noticed that the other students, including smiling Lana, seemed envious. When Lana asked Mr. Cody why she couldn’t work on the machine too, he told her it wasn’t for her. It was for someone with a different reading problem.
Instead of being happy about it, she looked disappointed. Mr. Cody winked at me, and I couldn’t help believing he was telling me the truth. I was different from the other students. I really didn’t belong in any class for the mentally challenged.
“That’s better already,” he said, looking over some of the work I had done the first hour.
Time passed faster than I thought it would, and I suddenly realized it was nearly eleven-thirty. Remembering the plan Ashley had suggested, I stopped working and doubled over with pretended cramps. It was something that always worked in classes where I had male teachers. Most of the time, they looked terrified and didn’t hesitate to give me permission to leave the room quickly. Mr. Cody was no different. He told me where the nurse’s office was, and I left the room.
Mrs. Fassbinder looked like she was close to eighty. Later, I found out she was a retired nurse who needed to supplement her income. The school had trouble finding anyone to fill the position. Her office was much larger than the nurse’s office in my last school. She had a desk and a work area with scales and blood pressure cups, closets full of bandages, disinfectants, and pairs of crutches, but off that office were three rooms with cushioned cots, blankets, and pillows in them.
I told her my problem, and she assigned me a room.
“Just rest awhile,” she suggested. “If you need something, it’s right here,” she told me, and showed me where she kept tampons and sanitary napkins.
Now that I was in the room and lying on the cot, I wondered what had happened to Ashley. I was beginning to feel silly about it when my door opened slightly and he peered in, holding a cold wet cloth over his forehead.
“Hey,” he said, and I sat up.
He looked back toward Mrs. Fassbinder, and then he stepped into my room and closed the door.
“Easy, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“After a while she’ll forget you’re even in here,” he said. “It’s almost time for her to go to lunch. I’ll be back as soon as she leaves,” he promised, and slipped out again.
A little more than five minutes later, he returned.
“She’s gone,” he said, sitting on the cot, “and when she leaves, she locks the door and puts a sign up telling the students she’s at lunch and to go to the office for emergencies.”
“I thought it would be harder to do something like this here,” I said. “You do it a lot?”
“Once in a while. When I have some good reason,” he added with a smile.
“What’s your good reason now?” I asked him.