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  In 1939, Santa was still expected to bring the tree as well as the presents, and that was the way our parents did it. That year Daddy waited until well after dark, into the bargaining hours when buyers were thin and the trees would be worthless in just a few hours. Stockings went up after dark as well, and everybody but Jane got to stay up long enough to switch our oranges out of our socks and into Jane’s. She loved them more than we did; we loved her more than we loved our own oranges.

  If anybody had asked me what religion I was I would have said “Christmas,” and the Bible of my Christmas was the Sears Wish Book. It arrived just after Thanksgiving and lived on the kitchen counter beside the meat grinder. People nowadays forget how small a person’s life could be before the war. Before every boy in our neighborhood shipped out for France or the Pacific, nobody on our block had traveled more than forty miles from Lynn, Massachusetts. We expected to marry somebody we met in high school, exactly the way our parents did. We figured getting to college was as likely as picnicking on Mars, and spittle-bent copies of National Geographic held the only exotica I ever expected to see. The Wish Book was a plate-glass window onto any number of faraway lives in which we would wear the mink stoles (page 287) and consider ordering the optional let-out skins (as soon as we figured out what a “let-out skin” actually was). We’d wear the gold watches (page 125) and live in a complete Arts and Crafts house (kits from $1,250, starting on page 368).

  There were no monsters in the Sears Wish Book universe. There were tools for welders, short-throw lever-action rifles for hunters, and baling equipment for farmers. If a potato farmer appeared in an illustration, he was as neat and blond and purposeful as the characters in a Dick and Jane primer. Nobody in the Wish Book lost his job. There were no Snyders in the country of Wish Book—Snyder who had made Jane cry by hiding her favorite plastic horse and telling her that it had died in the night. That was Snyder to a tee, senselessly mean in very little ways. I say it was a senseless meanness because being mean didn’t make him any happier. If you’re going to hide a plastic horse and tell its owner it’s dead, you should at least get some pleasure from it. Otherwise what are you doing? That was my enduring question—what was he doing?

  Why was our mother letting him get away with this? Where was justice! I told her what he’d done. She said it was none of my business. I said yes it was, and she said I was to butt out and mind my own business. MYOB, she said. Then I said something about it being her business to whack him good, but she wasn’t taking care of business and so he got away with tormenting every last one of us.

  I was told that cleaning out the coal bin might help me remember what MYOB meant. It was a long, dirty job and it didn’t warm me up to the idea of minding my own business at all. How can you mind your own business with your family trampling all over it at every opportunity? This question was still on my mind an hour later when I walked into the empty midafternoon living room and approached the record collection. You’re a Sweet Little Headache was our mother’s favorite, played so much that every one of us knew right where the scratches were. I sifted through until I found it. I brought it to my secret reading place at the back of the closet and I brought You’re a Sweet Little Headache down hard against the floorboards and left the shards where they lay. Maybe I half hoped that she had heard the sound of cracking vinyl and would come and find the remains. I know I felt a keen, gusty swoosh of satisfaction as the record broke. Then that feeling drained away and I felt what I imagined was how you feel when you’re poisoned, like something inside you was dying. Or had done it already. I didn’t speak to my mother all the next day. She pretended not to notice, which I minded.

  I hated how much she was in Snyder’s power. His unhappiness made her worry over him. A few times she made us let him have the Wish Book even when it wasn’t his turn. Sometimes it’s like that with awful people. You give in resentfully because the largest person in the room says you have to, but then you don’t mind so much because you can see it kind of works. And really you don’t want them to be miserable. So even though it was my turn I’d watch him sit there with Jane on his lap, looking down at diamond rings with her because that was what she wanted to see and he loved her. Mean or not, Snyder loved Jane. He just couldn’t control himself when the impulse came over him to tell her that her plastic horse died. If I was trying to see it from inside his head I guess I’d think it caused him some torment, but I’m not so inclined to try that.

  The only fly in the Wish Book ointment was the fact that everything in it cost money. Besides the previously mentioned pony, Janey the Hopeful had her eye on a sled that could be hers for $4.30—a pretty much impossible sum, we thought, but Jane didn’t. Snyder didn’t either, apparently. All along he was thinking very seriously about that $4.30 (plus shipping). In mid-November the Monsters in the Movies group started shuffling into our basement two or three times a week as well as the regular meeting time. And the shuffling thing got my attention. They actually looked a little shady, ducking their heads and keeping weirdly quiet until they got into the basement, and even there the chatter sounded muted. Gradually I saw that Snyder and Arnold Strato were the forces behind the extra meetings, and something involving cash was going on.

  Though Arnold was fifteen, he could talk like a grown-up when he was with grown-ups and he could mix with everything and everybody down to the youngest Monsters member. He was tiny, barely more than five feet five and fine-boned, and even though he was the kind of guy who would go to a Monsters in the Movies meeting, he had never been bullied in his life. Bullies just pinged off him—they approached him if they were new to him, and then after a little conversation, they’d veer off.

  I was pretty mesmerized by Arnold Strato. At first I thought he came to the Monsters in the Movies meetings just so he could be near Lilly. They said hello and she batted her eyes at him the first time or two he came over and I could see him heat up. Lilly did that just as a kind of reflex whenever she was near a boy who thought she was interesting, which was most boys. It didn’t mean anything and Arnold Strato figured that out quick, but miracle of miracles, he kept coming to meetings even after he stopped looking for her.

  “Were you guys counting money just then?” I asked him one afternoon after a meeting had broken up. The other members had scattered, and I found him for a moment by himself adjusting a pack on the back of his bicycle. It was a gratuitous question. I’d been sitting on the stairs going down to the basement, peering around the wall in my usual position and I’d seen Snyder fold a little pile of bills and put them into a tin box.

  “Yes.”

  He swung onto his bike.

  “Did the club get a job? Or something?”

  “Sort of.” I just waited then. He wasn’t peddling away, which is what any other member of the Monsters in the Movies club would do. He was looking right at me as if I were as human as any of them, which I suddenly realized was not the way most boys looked at me, and he was cheerful and calm, which made me feel the same things. He had that kind of power. “We’re selling some of our collections,” he said.

  “To who?” I thought every boy in school who would buy that stuff was already in the club.

  “We took out an ad. Put up flyers in other schools. Mailed some stuff around.”

  I shouldn’t have been shocked at this proof that Monsters boys were everywhere, but I was. “Whose idea was that?”

  “Your brother’s.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Well, we needed some Christmas money so we came up with an idea. It’s just fun. What does it matter whose idea it was?” Arnold Strato pushed away. He was one of those boys who treated machines like extensions of their bodies, everything clean and smooth, the bike skimming along like an animal with wheels. I stood and stared as he made his way to the end of the block, tipped to the left, and vanished.

  I went to find Snyder. “So Arnold helped you figure out how to make some money?”

  “Well, I was the one who knew which ones were the most va
luable,” he said.

  Hah. So it was Arnold’s idea. He saw the look on my face and his chin stuck up—its defensive posture.

  “Arnold just helped come up with ideas for finding guys who would pay for them. He was just helping me with a special project of mine. That’s all.”

  Arnold, it turned out, had been the one who designed and distributed flyers (his older brother had a car). Arnold had fronted the money for the ad but been paid back in full. Arnold had, it looked like, done just about everything except make a lot of money. I brought the story to Lilly, who wanted to know what Snyder needed the money for. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even asked, which she said was just like me.

  Christmas morning, all was revealed. There under the tree was a Sears sled with “To Janey from Snyder” on a tag tied to one running board. It took all of us by surprise but Janey, the girl who accepted it as the kind of thing the universe dropped at your doorstep whether General Electric had laid your dad off or not. She hugged Snyder and yanked on her snowsuit right then and there.

  The person most affected by the present was my mom. The sled made her cry—actually need to leave the room and find a handkerchief. Snyder Terhune had bought Janey a sled with money that could have gone to any number of comic books—and hadn’t. We all knew that something about his unhappiness flowed into places inside Mom that none of the rest of us reached. The mystery was how once all that trouble got inside her head it turned to love.

  That sled was magic. It looked like proof that the universe can come around and drop your heart’s desire right under a candle-lit tree. Snyder had been generous and kind. The world was better than I’d thought. We had oatmeal and hot chocolate for breakfast and then we all ran outside to follow Jane up and down the nearest hill. She got so much water in her ears from melted snow that she spent the next week in bed with an ear infection. She insisted that we bring the sled inside and prop it by her door so she could look at it from where she lay. All that week, evenings drew to a close with the murmuring from her room—Snyder reading her Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Lilly or Mom bringing her a cookie.

  I loved that Christmas. Most of us only know we were happy when we look back, but that week I was there inside it.

  That February, General Electric got a big contract and started hiring again. The men who’d been let go first were the first to be rehired, and Daddy once again packed his lunches in the early morning and walked purposefully away to contribute to the world’s needs in his own small and mysterious way. Mom got calmer. Vegetable dinner only happened on Wednesdays now instead of Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. There was roast pork the first Sunday after he returned to work. I’d watched my mother pull out flour and butter and precious eggs and line them up on the counter just to look at them for a minute or two before she was sure she could indulge in the spectacular luxury of a cake. She saw me so still there in the doorway and asked me if I wanted to bake with her, and the invitation felt almost illicit—intimate and just a tiny bit wild. I nodded, and we spent the next hour beating and separating and whipping. I was happy.

  Spring was close enough that we could smell dirt under the snow on warmer late afternoons and the sun stayed with us all the way to dinner. We felt safe again. We didn’t listen to reports about what was happening in Europe. We didn’t imagine that the world we lived in now had only had a few more months of life left in it.

  MRS. DANIELS AND ME, AGAIN

  The Pirate Lover

  Mrs. Daniels and I moved in and out of The Odyssey. She’d pull it out of my hands whenever I stopped reading too often to ask questions or comment, which irritated her. “For heaven’s sake, girl—stop asking about Penelope! The wife is in the story but it isn’t, essentially, her story. Enough of that.” She rummaged through the pile at her side. “Let’s return to the modern world.” She handed me some copies of Good Housekeeping and we made our way through several marital advice columns and a few of Mrs. Roosevelt’s contributions. I thought Mrs. Roosevelt was a very sensible woman, but her teeth frightened me. Just a little.

  “We’ll mix it up a bit,” Mrs. Daniels promised me at the end of that afternoon. “You needn’t worry—I’ll have us read the chapters where Penelope takes her ascendant place in the adventure and gets to set Odysseus to his last tests, but we can read several stories simultaneously. When you come next I’ll have winnowed out some possible titles.”

  On my next visit, we sat down beside a stack that included Leaves of Grass, Candide, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, and Black Beauty. She pulled Candide out of the mix just as I was reaching for it. “That was an error,” she said. “There are things there that perhaps your mother would object to your reading.” So Candide vanished, but I paid attention when she put it back on the shelf so that if an occasion to slip it into my school bag at the end of a reading session popped up, I’d be ready. I pushed Black Beauty forward as a likely candidate. I liked the picture on the cover.

  “Well, that was a mistake too.” She sighed, tossing it aside. “I don’t think I can sit through the trials and tribulations of a horse. I object not to the horse itself but to the fact that I am supposed to be sentimentally outraged over the sad parts of its story. Noble abused animals. Crippled children. Insufferably manipulative claptrap. Perhaps I can find something more acceptable to both of us.” She rooted through the pile and handed me The Call of the Wild. “How do you feel about dogs and dangerous climates? This one isn’t so sentimental.” I said I was enthusiastic about dogs, and off we went into the Arctic wastes.

  At home I kept on reading alone in the closet—an activity that satisfied me in ways that I didn’t really understand. I knew that according to the standards of my mother’s world, Electra Gates’s adventures were bad. I knew I was thrilled by their badness at the same time that I sometimes hid the book under my mattress, not trusting that the back of the closet was safe from discovery. My mother might go rooting around for an old snowsuit, after all. In the meantime I would close the wall of abandoned leggings behind me and go with Electra Gates while she discovered where the dangerous dress from the Marais would take her.

  THE PIRATE LOVER

  Soon after the ball, Electra and her mother received an invitation to a private summer house very near Calais. “My dear, it is better than we could have hoped!” cried her mother. “An invitation from Mr. Z! A country-estate weekend! I hear he keeps this summer retreat on the coast so as to more conveniently enjoy his yacht—that it has dozens of rooms and an enormous staff!”

  After so many hours spent in Parisian gatherings, any reserve that once might have kept Electra from repeating slander was quite gone. “They say Mr. Z keeps this country house in Calais, Mother, so that he can continue his illegal smuggling back and forth from England. He is British, is he not?”

  “Many people are, Electra. They cannot help it. As to how the man has acquired his wealth, what do you care what is said? Who knows who will be present this weekend.”

  “So, Mama, we are to care nothing of what is said about illegal smuggling, and to pay close attention to what is said about Mr. Z’s yacht and Mr. Z’s friends.”

  “Impertinent creature. You know very well that this invitation could be the result of one of those friends specifically asking for your presence. Perhaps that horrible Marais dress did its work after all.” Her mother moved through their rooms quickly. “Mr. Z is sending a carriage for us. He has arranged everything—a true gentleman.”

  They were swept off in a coach-and-four. A broken wheel delayed them halfway there and they arrived long after dark, dusty and hungry. They could hear laughter and music from somewhere else in the enormous house, but were told by the servants who greeted them that the other guests had retired. They were ushered to a private suite, where a meal was laid before the fire. None of the servants who poured their wine, drew their baths, and turned down their beds spoke more than a few words. “Breakfast in the dining room whenever you choose to rise, ma’am,” said the last as he slipped out
of their suite.

  “How wonderful!” Electra’s mother cooed. “How luxurious.”

  That morning found them still oddly alone.

  “It’s strange,” Electra murmured. “Mother, didn’t you hear others last night?”

  “Of course not. The servant said they had all retired.”

  “Are there not other guests?” Electra asked the pigtailed fellow who served them as they sat in splendid isolation along the long dining-room table.

  “I couldn’t say, miss.”

  “You are American?” she asked, surprised at his accent.

  “There’s a lot of different types wash ashore here in Calais, miss. The quays are just down the road, you see, and I was one that washed ashore. Mr. Z found a use for me.”

  “Where is our host?”

  “I couldn’t say, miss. But I’m told to say a recently arrived friend of Mr. Z is asking to speak to your mum when she’s done with her breakfast. In the drawing room.”

  Electra rose. “I am done with my breakfast. I’d be happy to see this person.”

  “Just your mum, miss. Those were the orders.”

  Electra’s mother dropped the bit of toast she had just spread thickly with marmalade and rose to her feet. “Just me? Of course. I’m with you entirely.”

  Electra sat frozen in her place for a moment after her mother was led from the dining room. Then she rose and made her way back to their suite, as uneasy as she had ever been in her life. She would insist they leave here the moment her mother reappeared. The minutes ticked by slowly. They had become an hour before her mother returned.

  “Oh, my dear! It is as I had hoped! An offer from a man of rank who saw you at the Paris ball and has become entranced—enslaved by the memory!”