Living Witness (12 page)

“Hello, Alice,”
Ms
. Marbledale said. “I recognized your voice. I expect you recognize mine.”

Alice made a face. She
expects
I do, does she? God, it was just like that woman.

“It's the middle of the breakfast rush,” Alice said. “I've got work to do.”

“I'm sure you do have work to do,”
Ms
. Marbledale said. “But so do I, and we have a situation on our hands this morning. I have Barbie in my office, and both of the Cornish children.”

“Those kids should learn to leave Barbie alone,” Alice said. “If you weren't such a secular humanist yourself, you'd see what was going on here. Those kids are
persecuting
my Barbie, and all the other Christian children in school. That's what they're doing. People like you are trying to drive all the Christians right out of school.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then
Ms
. Marbledale said, “You know, Alice, I'm not interested in having this conversation, not now and not in the future. I think I heard you through at least once by now. I'm going to let it go. If you want to find out what's going on, I suggest then you come down here and listen to me. In the meantime, Barbie will spend the day in detention. I suggest you talk this over with Lyman, Alice, because we're getting very close to the point where the Cornishes are going to have grounds to sue.”

“Sue me?” Alice said. “I'll sue them, bringing their atheism into the school. Trying to turn my children away from God.”

“That's enough, Alice.”

The phone was hung up on the other end of the line, and Alice found herself staring at the receiver still in her hand. She put it back into its cradle. It wasn't hard to remember what it had been like to be in school when she was Barbie's age or even older. Alice thought she had never hated anything as much as she'd hated school, and that had not been her fault. There were people who had called her stupid, but she wasn't stupid. She just didn't like being in there among the snots and the snobs, the little crapola people who thought they were just so wonderful because they read stupid books that no sensible person would ever want to read. Alice wasn't even sure she believed they read them. They just liked to make fun of people, those people did. At least, in her day, they didn't make fun of people for believing in God.

“It was better when we were going to school,” Alice said out loud.

Lyman turned to look at her. While she had been on the phone with
Ms
. Marbledale, Lyman had gone back to the grill. He was now standing in front of a huge pile of breakfast sausages and a long line of white stoneware plates.

“That was
Ms
. Marbledale who called,” Alice said. “I've got to go over to the school.”

“Now?” Lyman looked startled. “We're full up. Is Barbie hurt?”

“I don't know.” This was true.
Ms
. Marbledale hadn't been clear about what exactly had happened, so Alice had no way of knowing if she'd been hurt or not. If Barbie had been hurt, Alice thought she had
grounds for a lawsuit herself. She could sue the school for religious discrimination.

“It was better when we were in school,” Alice said, before Lyman had a chance to go back to his sausages. “I don't mean it was good. It was just better. There wasn't all of this stuff around. I never learned about Darwin in school, did you?”

“That might have been later,” Lyman said. “Or it might have been in the college course. I wasn't in the college course.”

“I don't understand why she thinks she can talk to me that way,” Alice said. “I'm her boss, no matter how much she doesn't like it. Me and Franklin Hale are her boss. She ought to have sense enough to be afraid of us.”

“Do you have to go over right now?” Lyman asked. “I'm up to my neck. Can't it wait half an hour?”

“No,” Alice said. She didn't know if that was true. The way
Ms
. Marbledale had talked, it might have been okay to let it go all day. It was only detention. Alice had spent a lot of time in detention when she was in school, and staying after, too, because teachers thought their work was the only thing that ought to count in your life.

“It isn't fair,” Alice said. She had moved through the kitchen to the vestibule in the back. She was standing next to the little rack where she and Lyman and the girls who worked the floor all hung their coats.

As far as Alice McGuffie was concerned, nothing about life was fair. All the good things went to people like
Ms
. Marbledale. No matter how long your walk with God was, you could never catch up to the
Ms
. Marbledales of this world, and the Annie-Vic Hadleys were worse. They all thought they were better than you. They all thought they were smarter than you. They all looked down their noses at you and sneered, and what for? Because you believed in God, that was what for, and they thought only stupid people believed in God.

Alice wound a scarf around her neck. It could have been hers, or it could have been Lyman's. They didn't make distinctions. Out the back door she could see the snow and the icicles that had been hanging around for days. It ought to be spring by now, but it wasn't, at least
not as the weather went. Annie-Vic was up at the hospital these days, lying in a bed with tubes coming out of her. One of the women in church worked as a volunteer there, taking the gift cart around and handing out pamphlets. She'd seen Annie-Vic all trussed up like a turkey, and looking bad enough to die.

Bad enough to die, Alice thought, and suddenly her day felt much better.

Annie-Vic was bad enough off to die, and then what would happen to her? She would end up face to face with God, that was what would happen to her, and then she'd spend eternity in a lake of fire. It said so, in the Bible, and it said that believers would have all eternity to watch the suffering of the souls in Hell.

Alice honestly thought she'd like that very much.

 

When Judy Cornish first got the call from Catherine Marbledale, she was panicked. Then Ms. Marbledale let her speak to Mallory directly, and after that, she was all right. She was better than all right, really. Judy had expected what she'd gotten the last time that venomous little Barbie McGuffie had gone after Mallory and Stacey, meaning hysteria and tears, but Mallory had sounded downright calm.
Eerily
calm. It was like listening to a grown woman who had just decided to kill her husband. There was no trace of emotion in that voice at all and quite a lot of rigidly controlled anger.

Judy had been in her kitchen when the call came. It was a spectacular kitchen, better than the one she had had in Somerville when they had been living near Boston. Housing was not a minor consideration for Judy. She liked ten-foot ceilings and two-story great rooms and all those little rooms that made life so much easier. In this house she had a laundry room as large as the dining room had been in their first house, and a mud room with built-in benches and cabinets so that people didn't track in dirt and snow when they came in from school, and a clutter room that was was for messy school projects like posters
and dioramas. This was the kind of thing you got when you worked hard and applied yourself—especially when you applied yourself at school. Education was the key to everything, and that meant education at a name college. The Ivy League would be best, but it wasn't strictly necessary. Anything in the first tier would do. If you didn't get that, you might as well curl up and die, as far as Judy was concerned. You might be able to pull your life out of your ass if you managed to get into a first-rate graduate school, but not many people managed to do that, and Judy thought she knew why. Being a slacker was like having a disease. It might even be catching.

The mud room was in the back, in a sort of passage to the garage, although it had a door to the real outside, so that the children could use it coming in from the yard. Judy had loved her own childhood. It had been full of things to do, things she'd found unavailable in Snow Hill to give to her own children. She had had piano lessons, and tennis lessons, and gymnastics lessons. She had had sleepaway camp for two weeks every summer—although that, she'd managed, even from here. She sent Mallory and Hannah to her own camp in New Hampshire, and Danny to Camp Awosting in Connecticut. Stacey Niederman went to camp with Mallory and Hannah. Sometimes Judy thought they were all out here re-creating civilization from scratch, as if there'd been a nuclear holocaust or some kind of supervirus that had wiped out all traces of it across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It was scary to think about it, but maybe it was like this over most of the United States. Maybe that was what “red states” were about, and that explained why the country kept voting in Republicans. Judy couldn't understand why anybody ever voted for Republicans, although her mother told her that all the best people used to, the people like the ones they'd grown up with.

“It was in about 1980 that it started to change,” Judy's mother had said. “And I don't know what happened, really, but suddenly it was all about those religious people, and so I changed parties. I had to, don't you think?”

Judy didn't know. She couldn't imagine what the Republican Party
had been like before “all those religious people.” She didn't care. She took her best parka out of her own personal cubicle—it had her name stenciled on it above the hook, at the top—and headed out to the garage and the Volvo. She'd been seven years old when her mother sat her down at the kitchen table with a pile of what looked like books and told her the way the world worked. The pile had not been of books but of college catalogues, which Judy's mother had sent away for even though Judy wasn't out of primary school.

Her mother had stretched out one set of them and said, “Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania. That's the best. That's the Ivy League.” Then she had stretched out a second set and said, “Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Radcliffe. That's the seven sisters. That's almost as good, for a girl, but Radcliffe will be Harvard in a few years. It won't matter. Then there's this.” She had flipped over the last book. “That's Stanford, in California. That's the only place worth going to in the West.”

Judy had to admit she didn't understand much of any of this at the time. The whole episode scared her, though, because she had understood that there were conditions on her life going as she wanted it to. She would have to have something to do with these places her mother was showing her, and no other places, if she wanted her mother to go on being proud of her. It was a big looming mountain, right in front of her face. Good people, nice people, people like her parents and their friends, went to these places, and after they left they had jobs in companies that everybody had heard of. Other people didn't matter.

Judy climbed into the Volvo and put her seat belt on. She put it on automatically, even if she was just going to sit behind the wheel and not drive anywhere, and so did all of her children. She flicked the button on the garage door opener and watched the garage door pull up behind her. She started the car and put the heat on. It was so cold she was finding it hard to breathe.

By the time she was eleven or so, she had it all figured out. The people who did not go to the kind of colleges her mother had mentioned,
the people who went to state schools and then went to work in the small local companies that were everywhere, even in the kinds of towns where Judy grew up, those people did nothing important with their lives. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” Henry David Thoreau had said, in the book they'd read in Judy's gifted class, and Judy thought she knew what he'd meant. He'd meant
those
people, the ones in remedial everything, or the ones who were just average, who didn't go to lessons, who didn't care about anything. At least, Judy didn't see that they cared about anything. They had all sorts of stuff they did, but none of it was stuff that would help them in the long run.

What we have to do here, Judy thought, is make Snow Hill the kind of place children can grow up in and succeed. We need to tear down that elementary school and build modern schools, a primary school and a middle school and a high school. If there were modern schools, there wouldn't be this problem we're having with Barbie McGuffie.

Judy's cell phone was in her purse. It was a pink Razr. Dan had offered to get her an iPhone, but that hadn't made sense to her. The children all had iPhones. They liked music and looking at the Internet when they got bored with school, which they often were. Honestly, Judy thought. She'd never understood why people were unhappy with the public schools until she'd come to Snow Hill. When public schools were like this, she was unhappy with them, too.

Judy held down the number 6 and waited until the phone started automatically dialing Shelley Niederman's number. She hoped she hadn't waited so long that Shelley had already started driving to the school. She looked at her eye makeup in her rearview mirror. She didn't wear much eye makeup anymore. She used to wear a lot.

“Yes?” Shelley said.

“It's me,” Judy said, although she didn't need to. Her cell number was on Shelley's caller ID. “Did you get a call from Catherine Marbledale?”

“I did indeed,” Shelley said.

“Are you going in to see what's going on?”

“I don't know. I talked to Stacey. She seemed to be all right.”

“I talked to Mallory,” Judy said. “She seemed to be more than all right. But I'm going in anyway. I've been thinking. Maybe we've been going about this all wrong.”

“You don't think we should be complaining about it when a big thug like Barbie McGuffie beats up on our children.”

“Of course I think we should be complaining about it,” Judy said, “but I've been thinking and thinking, and it occurs to me that we're doing this backwards. We're being too negative.”