The Yearbook (11 page)

The principal set aside his morning business to attend to Mrs. Wrigley, one of the town's most prominent citizens, and soon the two had come up with a school schedule for Lola that included history, science, art, glee club, and home economics. When the bell rang, Lola found herself at a neat little wooden desk at the front of a history class. History was not her best subject; Lola would have been hard-pressed to say which subject was. The day's topic, announced on the blackboard, was the World War. What luck! Lola had seen a documentary about that very subject a few weeks before.

“For the love of cucumbers. Look who it is.”

The high, familiar voice came from directly behind Lola's head. She turned, and there sat Whoopsie Whipple.

“Mike, is it you?”

“I guess it is,” Lola said.

“Remember me?”

“You're Whoopsie. From the dance.”

“That's right. Say, we thought maybe we'd see you around school last Monday, but then when you didn't come, we figured you thought we were all a bunch of big, dumb hicks and caught the first train back east.”

“East?”

“To New York.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Whoopsie punched Lola in the arm and laughed.

“Peter looked all over for you for a couple of days.”

Lola leaned forward. “Peter?”

“Peter Hemmings. Mad scientist. The boy you danced with all night. Surely you haven't forgotten him?”

“He looked for me?”

“Oh my goodness, yes, and Paulette was livid. She could have chewed nails, I'll tell you that.”

“Who's Paulette?”

“Why, Paulette Waters, the girl who's determined to become the designated Mrs. Peter Hemmings by graduation. Of course, he's too busy with his mad scientist routine to take much notice. But he sure did take notice of you, Mike.”

Lola felt like she was hovering a few inches above her seat, like a helium balloon.

“You sure have changed in a week,” Whoopsie went on. “You don't look anything like a boy now, Mike. Why, you're all cream puffs and sunlight.”

“What were you saying, about Peter?”

Whoopsie ignored the question. “Notice anything different about me?” Her eyes were open wide, and her mouth hung open as she waited for Lola's answer. “Give up?” Whoopsie swept her left hand up from the desk and placed it close up in Lola's face. “I'm engaged. Thumbtack proposed right after the dance. It was your doing, Mike. Boy, was he jealous of that farmer.”

“Engaged. Wow. How interesting. Have you thought this through?”

Whoopsie's right eyebrow arched up. “Huh? Thought what through?”

“You know. The commitment.”

“What commitment?”

“Aren't you a little young to get married?”

Whoopsie laughed. “But Mike, I turned seventeen last week. I'm just the right age to be engaged.”

“You are?” Lola said.

“Of course.” Whoopsie waved the ring-hand. “Look. It's even bigger than Ruby Gadd's ring.”

“Who?”

“Ruby Gadd.” She lowered her voice. “Back there in the back row. She's been engaged to Hershel Vanderveen for six months.”

“Congratulations, then,” Lola said. “But what about that chorus girl stuff? Broadway and all?"

“Shhh. Not so loud. It's a secret, remember?”

“So Thumbtack's going with you?”

But Whoopsie didn't answer. Her face was a mask of studious alertness, focused on a spot at the front of the room.

“You there. New girl.”

Lola twisted back toward the front. “Me?”

Miss Roach glared at Lola with small black eyes that sat on either side of a big knobby nose. Her black hair was pulled tight in a glossy bun. Lola shuddered.

“I shall repeat my question for the new girl, who was not paying attention,” Miss Roach said. “Please explain the principle reason for the outbreak of the war.”

Lola thought back to the documentary. It had actually been pretty interesting. “Hitler invaded Poland,” she stated confidently. She was off to a good start.

“Pardon me?”

“That's right, isn't it?”

Miss Roach looked befuddled.

Lola changed course. “And the Japanese. They bombed Pearl Harbor and sank the USS
Arizona
and—”

Miss Roach's eye began to twitch.

“Wasn't it the
Arizona
? The
Arkansas
, then?”

Lola looked to the other students for support but found expressions of mild curiosity.

“Well, Miss—what's your name?”

“Lundy. Lola Lundy.”

“Well, Miss Lundy. I don't know what type of schooling you've had in the Wild West, but here in Ashfield, we take our history seriously.”

“But Hitler—”

“Who?”

She put a finger under her nose to simulate the notorious moustache. “You know. Adolf Hit—” Then it dawned on her: They must have been talking about World War I. Lola retracted her finger. Pearl Harbor wouldn't be bombed for another who knows how many years. Of World War I she knew nothing whatsoever. The truth be told, she could not even say with certainty who the participants were.

A boy in the back raised his hand and talked about colonial expansion and the assassination of an Austrian archduke. Miss Roach returned to her normal color. Lola shrank back into her seat and said nothing until the bell rang.

She hoped Peter might be in one of her classes or that he'd hear she was in school and seek her out. But when the final bell sounded she hadn't caught sight of him. Nor did she see him Tuesday or Wednesday. His absence seemed to inflame her imagination. On Wednesday night, she thought she saw him from her bedroom window, standing in the dark among the tangles of dormant rosebushes. But when she looked again, nobody was there. On Thursday she thought she'd spotted him at the far end of the east corridor, but he ducked into the chemistry lab. She began to wonder if he was avoiding her. Could it have anything to do with—what was her name?—that Paulette person?

At the end of school on Friday Lola positioned herself on the edge of the mermaid fountain and watched the students pour down the stairs. She pretended to be watching the cascade from the mermaid's mouth but was all the time looking clear through it, at the main entrance, determined to find Peter.

As the exodus trickled out, Lola felt she'd seen almost every other student in the school leave for the weekend, as well as most of the teachers. Now she began in earnest to wonder if Peter was avoiding her. He must have known she was attending classes. It was all over school. A new girl from New York and Colorado didn't show up in Ashfield every day. In fact, she'd been the object of great curiosity. Students had been approaching her all week with words of welcome, and even little presents. One girl had given her a lavender sachet, and another, a perfect apple.

When the sky clouded, she abandoned her vigil at the fountain and gathered up her things. The Wrigleys had offered to pick her up in the car, but she liked the walk past the brown autumn fields, and the feeling of arriving, chilly but clear-headed, at a warm home. The sidewalk came to an end a few blocks from the school, and she continued along the dusty shoulder, watching the clouds shift, revealing and then covering the sun, and the shadows that came and went under the nodding trees. She had ridden her bike up and down this same street many times but had never noticed the birdsong or the sound of the wind in the trees. Lola's old world had been cluttered and noisy, and had seemed to move so much faster. In this unfamiliar slowness, she noticed the last dandelions blooming along the ditches, the bark of a dog somewhere far off across the field, and the way the toes of her red leather shoes parted the dust.

She was halfway home when the squeal of tires made her look up.

“Hey! You! Mike!” Whoopsie Whipple beckoned from behind the wheel of a brand new antique Ford. Little Ruby Gadd sat in the passenger seat. “I'll drive you,” Whoopsie called. “Get a wiggle on.”

“Proceed at your own risk,” squeaked Ruby. “She's not on the giggle water today, but you'd never know it by the way she drives.”

Whoopsie punched the girl in the arm. “Oh dry up, Ruby Gadd.”

Lola pulled open the heavy rear door and settled herself in the vast leathery living room of the back seat. Whoopsie hit the gas and the car rocketed down the road. Between the school and Lola's house, Whoopsie nearly crashed half a dozen times: a mailbox missed by an inch, a tree rearing up without warning, tires riding the rim of a rain-swollen ditch. Ruby shrieked all the way down the road. When a hunk of turf thudded against the windshield, she hurled herself into the back seat next to Lola.

“Whoopsie Whipple, you're not fit to operate an automobile,” Ruby said.

“I'm not sure if it's any safer back here,” Lola said as Whoopsie sideswiped a picket fence.

“That's a lousy place for a fence,” complained Whoopsie, and honked her silly-sounding horn at it.

“You'll never see thirty, Whoopsie Whipple,” Ruby said. “You might not see twenty.”

The tires squealed horribly and then all was dead calm. Lola uncovered her eyes. The Ford was parked at the curb in front of the Wrigley house.

“Have yourself some dinner and then I'll be back to pick you up,” Whoopsie said as Lola fled the car.

“Pick me up?” It was an alarming prospect.

“For the big sing at the Hillside home.”

“Big sing?”

“I know it's only your first day in glee club, but you've just got to come, Lola. You'll add that certain air of New York sophistication to an otherwise gruesome event.”

“Wear your crash helmet,” Ruby called from the window as Whoopsie swerved back onto the road and out of sight.

The smell of baking met Lola's nose as she opened the front door, and Eunice's voice rang out from the sunny breakfast room. “Lola, is that you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Wrigley.”

Lola found Eunice and the judge seated with a teapot and a tray of pastries in the back room, reading the mail.

“Have an éclair, dear,” Eunice said. “And a cup of tea.”

Eunice removed her reading glasses and looked at Lola. “Do you like the school? It's so modern, very up-to-date.”

Lola nodded.

“Mr. Watson, the principal, you know, he made a few notes about your academic status for us.”

Henrietta set an éclair in front of Lola and she took a big bite.

“You're a little behind, Lola.”

“I'm
behind
?” said Lola.

Eunice patted her arm. “Now, you mustn't let that worry you. Understandably, your time among the miners has delayed your education.”

Lola nodded sadly. “The miners. Yes. They did delay me.”

“Of course they did, the damn filthy ruffians,” the judge blustered.

“Lola, dear, the judge and I will tutor you,” Eunice said, “and before you know it, you'll be right up-to-date. We know an intelligent young lady when we see one.”

Lola wiped the chocolate from her mouth with a pretty embroidered napkin. “Thank you, Mrs. Wrigley, Judge Wrigley.”

Eunice looked tenderly at Lola with her calm blue eyes. “I'd like you to call me ‘Aunt Eunice,' Lola. If you don't mind.”

“And you could call me ‘Uncle Horace'; that is, if it sits right with you,” the judge said.

“Could I?” Lola whispered.

“We're family, Lola. We'd be proud to have you call us your aunt and uncle.”

Lola began to cry. The tears came up so fast that she didn't have a chance to stop them. It was how Eunice had said “family,” and how she'd meant her, Lola. She'd never had an Aunt anybody or an Uncle anybody or an any anybody.

“Gadzooks, here come the waterworks. Just like your auntie here,” Uncle Horace said, handing Lola his big white starched handkerchief. “Get it all out now, whatever it is, and you'll feel all the better for it.”

“I'm all right, Uncle Horace,” Lola said. “I'm fine.”

“It's getting late. You ought to go freshen up for the glee club, dear. It's a fine community service they do.”

Hillside Manor was a big brick house, a local landmark, in fact, where Lola's mother had been taken time and again during the last year of her life. In Lola's time it stood at the center of a complex of modern glass-and-steel annexes: Wing A for old folks, Wing B for mental patients, and Wing C for the physically disabled, or, as she'd heard a fellow Wrigley resident once describe it after a brief, unhappy stay:
A
for
ancient
,
B
for
bonkers
, and
C
for
crippled
.

Now, as Lola looked up the wooded hillside, she saw only the original brick building and, from the talk around her, understood the place was an old folks' home. There was no parking lot, and Whoopsie left the car on the side of the road. Others girls were arriving at the same time, and small battalions of singers formed as the girls hiked up the hill, merging into a choir by the time they arrived at the big front doors and rang the bell.

Lola was surprised to see that the place didn't look at all like a hospital but rather like a great, big house. Persian rugs decorated floors of dark, polished wood. Heavy brocade draperies hung on the windows. The same sense of quiet that Lola had noticed everywhere pervaded Hillside Manor. No phones rang. There were no beeping machines, buzzing alarms, television chatter. The noises underneath that went unnoticed in Lola's day made themselves heard: the creak of a leather shoe on a plank, the rattle of a crystal doorknob, the soft knocking of a boiler, the jingle of a charm bracelet.

The audience was assembled in the main hall near the piano. The old ladies wore dark dresses that grazed the floor, and some sat in wheelchairs made of wicker. The old men had no teeth and smoked pipes and talked about the Civil War. Instead of nurses there were nuns, moving about in their long white robes topped with pale blue aprons.