The Book of One Hundred Truths (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

I
didn’t set out to become a liar. I knew the story about George Washington and his cherry tree and his little ax.

The first couple of serious lies I told almost made me sick. After I told them, I felt dizzy, as if I was halfway to throwing up.

But then it got easier. One lie led naturally to the next. And eventually the lies started to feel like helium balloons: I could tie them to things I didn’t want to think about, then watch them rise into the air and float away.

“So—I hear you were born here in Minneapolis,” said Mrs. Benitez, our new neighbor. It was early April and she and her family had just moved in. She had spotted me dragging a plastic bag full of kitchen scraps out to the trash cans in the alley, and she leaned over the fence that separated our two backyards. “I have two little boys who are looking forward to winter sports. Do you play hockey? Do you like to skate?”

“Actually, no.” I paused by the fence, trash bag at my side. “I have an artificial leg,” I said. “I can’t.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.” Mrs. Benitez wiped her hands. She’d been sprinkling salt on her sidewalk. “That must be difficult for you. But if it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t have noticed.”

I told her not to be sorry; I was getting used to it. I told her that the new kind of leg I had actually fit very well.

“An
artificial leg
?” my mother asked a week or so later. She pointed out that I had already told another neighbor, Mrs. Guest, that I couldn’t walk her dog because I wasn’t allowed outdoors after four o’clock. My parents had been getting fairly strict, I had tried to explain. Mrs. Guest was surprised.

“Maybe Thea doesn’t like dogs,” my father suggested.

“I’m not sure that we should force her to walk them.”

“Dogs aren’t the issue here,” my mother insisted. “And neither are artificial legs.” She put her fingers under my chin and forced me to look at her. “Is this some kind of phase you’re going through? What’s this about, anyway?”

I told her it wasn’t
about
anything.

“Are you sure?”

Yes,
I was sure. Other parents, I told my mother, probably
wished
their kids had more imagination.

About a week later I told my science teacher, Ms. Wang, that I had a learning disability. It wasn’t serious, I explained, but my doctor thought it might help if I could sit at the back of the classroom next to the window, by myself.

“Thea?” my mother asked. She and Ms. Wang, it turned out, had run into each other at the grocery store. Who could have known they would shop on the same afternoon, at the very same place? Ms. Wang, my mother said, had suggested that I might benefit from several sessions with a counselor. Luckily, Ms. Wang had explained, there was a counselor I could meet with for free, and he worked at my school.

“What do you think?” my mother asked. She had her hands on her hips.

No way, I told her. There was nothing wrong with me, and I had no intention of talking to a counselor. Absolutely none.

“Let’s just start by getting acquainted,” said Mr. Hanover, the counselor. “We’ll spend some time talking here in my office, and I’ll try to understand what you might be going through.” Mr. Hanover was tall, way over six feet, and whenever he spoke, I ended up staring at his shoes. They were black and polished and enormous. I imagined them waiting patiently in his closet when he wasn’t wearing them, at night. “How does that sound?” he asked. “Thea? Hello?” He wanted to know what I was thinking, just like my mother did.

“I’m not thinking anything,” I told him. Actually, I was thinking that the only kids who got pulled out of class to see Mr. Hanover were the ones who set fires in the bathroom trash cans or carved their names into the bulletin boards with tacks. I got pulled out of class because Ms. Wang had run into my mother in the grocery store.

“It’s all right to feel confused sometimes,” Mr. Hanover said. His left shoe nudged a yellow paper clip across the carpet. “And I want you to know that you can speak to me about your feelings in perfect confidence.”

“That’s great,” I said. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something else. “Thanks for telling me,” I added.

“How are you getting along with your classmates?” The yellow paper clip disappeared beneath the sole of his shoe. “I hear there’s been a little bit of tension.”

“No, not really,” I said. Mostly, the other kids didn’t pay any attention to me. If I opened my mouth and said something that sounded like a lie—for example, that I wasn’t allowed to complete the autobiography assignment because my parents felt that writing about myself would make me conceited—there might be a pause in the conversation, like a hole appearing suddenly at our feet, but then somebody else would start talking and the class would go on, and the hole would be covered with words.

I always knew that the hole was still there, though, pulsing and breathing underneath us. We walked right across it. We ignored it. We kept going.

“I understand that your parents are concerned about a number of tall tales that have gotten back to them. Am I right?” Mr. Hanover smiled. His smile was wide and creepy, as if the edges of his mouth were made of elastic. “There was something last week; let’s see….” He scanned his desk for a piece of paper. “You weren’t able to participate in gym class because your religious beliefs don’t allow for—”

“Relay races,” I said. “I’m Episcopalian.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Hanover. “I suppose that explains it.”

We both stared at his shoes.

“School can be stressful.” Mr. Hanover spoke to the spotted carpet between us. “But talking to someone about what you’re experiencing can help quite a bit. A lot of people find that during difficult episodes of their lives, or even periods of trauma—”

“I have to be getting back to class now,” I said. “I think we have a test coming up. I need to study.”

“But you didn’t let me finish my sentence.” The toe of his right shoe moved slowly up and down.

“You can finish it next time,” I said.

But I tried to make sure that there wasn’t a next time. When Ms. Wang called me to the front of the class a few days later and handed me a slip of paper that read,
Appt w/ Mr. Hanover,
I told her I didn’t know anyone by that name.

“Room 107,” Ms. Wang whispered. She was trying to be subtle.
Room 107
had a reputation. “On the first floor,” she added. “Near the main office.”

I told her I had no idea in the world where that was.

CHAPTER FOUR

Truth #1: My father doesn’t like goodbyes.

Truth #2: Most Grummans are weird. Some are weirder than others.

Truth #3: I don’t know what to write in this notebook.

Celia and Ellen and I pulled into the driveway at two-fifteen. “Home sweet home,” Celia said. “Thea? Do you need help with your bags?”

“No, I’m coming.” I got out of the car. The air was thick and wet and salty. Not like the air in Minneapolis, which smelled like trees.

I grabbed my suitcase. My grandparents’ house loomed in front of us. It looked like a big white shoe box. It was old and crooked, with two sets of outdoor stairs and two wooden porches, upper and lower, that overlooked the Atlantic. Theirs was the last house on the block at the tip of the island, so the rest of Port Harbor—the tiny center of town, the hotels and the pizza shops and the boardwalk—seemed to be crowded to the north of us, on one side. Squinting against the sun, I looked up. A row of multicolored beach towels hung like flags from the railing on the second floor.

Ellen plucked a sheaf of letters from the mailbox. “Mostly bills,” she said. “And junk mail.” Raising her eyebrows, she tucked one letter into her purse, then whipped a rubber band from around her wrist and quickly fastened the others together.

“Thea! There you are. We’ve all been waiting for you,” my Nenna said, opening her arms at the top of the steps as I walked up. She smelled of suntan lotion and ripe fruit. “Look: you’re taller than I am,” she said. “Granda, come and see who’s here!”

Behind her, my Granda shuffled forward slowly. He was older than Nenna and very stiff; he had Parkinson’s disease, which my dad said made it hard for him to move.

“Hi, Granda,” I said. “How’s it going?”

He moved his spotted hand toward me and made an awkward thumbs-up sign. He seemed a lot older than he had the year before.

“Come in! Do you want something to eat? Or drink?” Nenna asked. “What can I get for you?”

“We fed her, Mom,” Ellen said. “We didn’t abuse her or let her go hungry.”

“Although we thought about it.” Celia poked me in the ribs with a sturdy finger. “Are you ready to face the crowd?”

Visiting my grandparents when my aunts and uncles and cousins were around was like walking headfirst into a storm. My father’s relatives argued and interrupted each other in midsentence and shouted to each other from opposite corners of the house. I wasn’t used to that kind of commotion. There might have been only eight people in Nenna’s kitchen and living room, but it felt like eighteen.

“Hey, T! You’re uglier than ever.” My cousin Liam was eating ice cream from the carton in front of the open freezer, his mouth overflowing with vanilla fudge. My aunt Phoebe’s baby, Ralph (I had almost forgotten he existed), was crying, the TV was on, Austin was yelling about someone having moved his binoculars, and my uncle Corey, Phoebe’s husband, was on his way out the door with a set of golf clubs. He slapped me on the back. “Welcome to the madhouse.” He laughed.

People hugged me and patted me and told me I’d grown. Outside the big sliding doors that led to the beach, the sun was flashing against the surface of the water. At the right time of day, I thought, the ocean looked like the world’s largest broken mirror.

“It’s a little noisy here,” Nenna said. “Would you like to unpack?”

“Okay.” I grabbed my bags and followed her up the stairs. We had to stick close to the wall to avoid my Granda’s mechanical chair. He could sit in it and press a button, and it would carry him all the way up the steps.

“One more flight.” Nenna paused on the landing; she was out of breath. Her arms and legs were dark, her skin freckled and papery from more than half a century of summers spent in the sun. “I hope you won’t be too warm up here,” she said when we got to the attic. “I asked Ellen to get you a fan.”

The attic wasn’t as awful as it used to be. The rug was gone, and someone had cleared out a lot of the junk and pushed the boxes of old clothes and holiday decorations into a corner. Still, it wasn’t a bedroom. It was more like a large hot open space, a sort of shapeless hallway at the top of the house. At one end, there was a tiny bathroom near the stairs. At the other end, near the window that overlooked the ocean, someone had set up two beds and two dressers.

“Jocelyn asked for the bed on the left,” Nenna said, “which means this one’s yours.” She patted a metal army cot, the kind that looked like it would shriek every time I turned over.

“And let me see, where are your sheets? Here they are. It’s so good to see you. There are plenty of towels in the downstairs closet. Will you want to go swimming right away?”

“No, thanks, Nenna.”

“Maybe later, then.”

“No, I don’t think so.” I looked at the blue-and-white-striped mattress. It was lumpy, and it made the bed look like a prisoner’s. “I don’t swim.”

“Not at all?”

I shook my head.

Nenna cradled my face in her hands. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “The world is not always gentle with us.”

I asked her which dresser I should use.

“This one. I emptied the drawers for you.”

“Thanks.” I unzipped my suitcase. On top of a pile of shorts and T-shirts was a note from my parents.
Relax. Have fun. Remember that we love you,
the note said.

Nenna read it over my shoulder and said she thought that sounded like very good advice.

The problem with the “have fun and relax” idea was that it wasn’t easy to relax in a boxy old house with a dozen people, especially when at least half of them met my mother’s definition of
eccentric.
There was the problem of dinner, for example. At home in Minneapolis, dinner was just my mother and my father and me. And even though my father had a few little quirks—he liked to line the silverware up beside the plates so that all the knives were facing the same direction—we usually managed to have a fairly normal meal.

Dinner in Port Harbor was a different story—not because it was noisy (which it was), but because of what my aunts and uncles called the dinner game. Even my father liked to play it. The dinner game surfaced whenever a lot of Grummans ate together.

“Oh, no,” Austin groaned when he saw the folded strips of paper at each plate on the table. “Can’t we just sit down and eat our food like regular people?”

“Blame your mother this time.” Celia grinned. “She set up this round.”

Nenna had made broiled flounder and baked potatoes and broccoli with cheese. Each of us was supposed to sit in front of the folded slip of paper that bore his or her name. As soon as the dishes were passed around, the guessing started.

“Is it height or weight?” Phoebe asked.

“No, too easy,” Celia said. “Good flounder, Mom. Does Ralph count?”

“Only if he stays where he is.”

The object of the game was to figure out what order we were sitting in. We might be seated according to age, or hair color, or the second letters of our middle names. Sometimes dinner was long over before anyone discovered what the answer was. I tried to distract myself by counting the ships on the faded wallpaper in front of me.

“What if we can’t tell where Ralph’s sitting?” Uncle Corey asked. “Is he to the right of Phoebe, or the left? Is there any butter?”

“Left,” Ellen said. “Actually, I suppose it doesn’t matter.” Ralph was nursing, tucked up under Phoebe’s shirt.

“Jeez, Phoebe,” Austin said. “Do you have to do that at the table? I’m trying to eat dinner here.”

“Don’t be selfish,” Phoebe told him. “You boys were both breast-fed. Weren’t they, Ellen?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Austin said.

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. I counted thirty-one wallpaper ships.

“What about shoe size?” Celia asked. She tapped her finger against her knife before picking it up. “Thea, pass the vegetables.”

It seemed almost impossible to eat with the platters of food always circling.

“I don’t like broccoli.” Edmund scowled.

“No one likes broccoli.” Austin ground so much pepper onto his potatoes, they almost turned gray. “Who invented this stupid game, anyhow?”

“No one remembers,” Ellen said.

“That isn’t true.” Nenna raised her hand. “I invented it.”

We all turned to stare at her.

“
You
did, Nenna?” Jocelyn asked. She was cutting her fish into itsy-bitsy perfect pieces.

Nenna put down her fork. “It was the only way I could think of to get my children to set the table. They used to fight for the opportunity,” she said. “I didn’t think they’d still be playing it when they were grown.”

“Granda wants to say something,” Liam announced.

My Granda had picked up his water glass as if getting ready to make a speech. But he just wiped a speck off the side of the glass and then drank from it. He winked.

“Maybe signs of the zodiac, alphabetically?” Uncle Corey asked. “Is there any more fish?”

“Nope. We did signs of the zodiac last year,” Ellen said. “I remember because I’m the one who guessed it.”

“Pass your Granda the bread and butter,” Nenna said to Austin. “And don’t read the sports page at the table. Thea, aren’t you hungry?”

“I am,” I said, “but I—”

“Middle names spelled backwards?” Phoebe asked. “Number of syllables in our names? Or number of letters?” She was burping Ralph against her shoulder.

“Ellen, will you tell us if we’re getting closer?” Celia asked. “Does it have to do with our names?”

“Nope.”

“Social Security numbers?”

“Nope.”

I looked around the table, from Granda at one end, to Jocelyn and Edmund at the other. “It’s the order we came here in,” I said.

Everyone fell silent. Only Granda’s fork continued to clink against his plate.

“Is that it?” Liam asked. “Is that the answer?”

I pointed at everyone around the table. “Nenna and Granda and Celia live here, so they’re first. And then Liam and Austin, because they started working here in June, and then Edmund and Jocelyn, because they came a couple of days ago, and then Ellen and Phoebe and Ralph and Corey. And I’m last—because I came today, and I’m here by myself.”

“That sounds very lonely,” Phoebe said. “I wouldn’t exactly say that you’re here by yourself.”

“Of course you’re not here by yourself,” Nenna said. “And we’re all very happy to see you.”

“I’ll eat that broccoli,” Austin said. “If no one else wants it.”

I passed him the broccoli. “I’m happy to be here,” I said. I wasn’t sure yet whether I was telling the truth or a lie.