“Oh, please don’t fight!” I said.
It was stupid because they were both too grown up to solve their problems that way, but it broke the ice. Tom turned to pick up the suitcase he’d dropped when he fell.
“Come on,” Louis said without looking at either of us. “I have a car.”
We had to walk single file out of the train station because it was so crowded with another train pulling out and people rushing around.
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted, and I wished with all my heart I could jump on that train and go somewhere—anywhere away from Tom and Louis and the awful tension between them.
By the time we reached the car, Louis had turned cheerful again. “Tom,” he said, “can you squeeze in front with Addie so you won’t be alone in the back?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tom coldly.
“Don’t call me ‘sir,’” Louis said in the same cheerful tone, “I’m your father!”
It was a mistake. Much too soon. I could have told him that. If he wanted Tom to love him, he’d have to do something. Nothing he said, no matter how silvery his tongue, would make a bit of difference with Tom. Why didn’t I think to tell Louis that when he asked for help? He didn’t know Tom the way I did and he kept making the same stupid mistakes, talking as though he were a normal father who came home every night. It didn’t work, and one look at the thin line of Tom’s mouth told me he was making Tom hate him all the more.
I tried to think of something to say to change the subject. If only I’d had Sandra Lee’s etiquette book. Dearest was a little too intimate for the occasion but I could have found the right phrase in Emily Post. Better yet, if only I’d had the sense to mind my business and stay home, I wouldn’t have a problem. I sat there tongue-tied while poor Louis hung himself.
Finally in desperation I said, “Tom, I read in the newspaper where Roosevelt made a speech and said all that matters is who fires the last shot.” I hadn’t exactly read it but Uncle Henry had and then announced it to everyone at the breakfast table.
“Yes,” said Tom, forgetting he was supposed to be mad, “and Hitler answered him and said ‘the last battalion in the field will be German.’ If I were the president, I’d send troops over there right now and put an end to that maniac!”
“He can’t do that, Tom,” said Louis patiently. “The president needs congressional—”
“I know what the president needs,” Tom interrupted rudely. “He needs congressional permission to go to war. If I were president, I’d figure a way around that, but since I’m just a kid in school, I don’t even have a say in who invades my own house.”
I gasped and stole a glance at Louis. He didn’t say a word, but he looked startled, then very angry. No one said another thing until we got home. Then Louis said sternly, “Tom, walk Addie to her door. Then go see your mother. She’s waiting for you in her room.”
“I know what to do,” Tom said rudely. “You park and I’ll walk home.”
With that he turned his back on his father, and we walked to my door, Tom striding ahead of me. I had never seen him so angry.
“Tom?” I tried.
“Goodnight, Addie,” he said.
There went my one and only friend. I slunk into the house. Sandra Lee was listening to the radio in the living room and I got up the stairs without her hearing me. The evening had been a gigantic flop. Some stupid to think I could get anywhere with a forty-five-year-old man when I couldn’t even make a dumb football player say more than “Hello” to me! And now, the only friend I had, hated me as much as he hated his father. I was a traitor and he knew it.
I looked in the mirror and saw that half the curls had survived the Jordan. Dolores?! I looked like Albert Einstein. Tears came to my eyes and I thought, oh, Aunt Eveline, why did you have to die before I grew up all the way? Please don’t send me any more penance, because I’ve done enough to cover dozens of sins I haven’t even gotten around to committing yet.
I turned off the light and went to the window. I could see my very own old room at Three Twenty only about fifteen feet away. Oh, how I wished I were there still, snug in my bed, too young to have a love life, with Aunt Eveline about to tuck me in and tell me what a great artist I would be some day. I’d been crying a long time in the dark, staring over at my window, when suddenly I could see in. The door to the lighted hall opened, and there in the window, silhouetted through ruffled organdy curtains, the kind I’d always wanted and never had, I saw a girl. I only saw her for a moment and heard a woman’s voice carry across: “Don’t forget your medicine, Norma Jean. Goodnight.” And the door shut out the light.
The next morning when Uncle Henry knocked on my door to wake me for school, I discovered my head felt like a cannon ball, my nose was stopped up, and my throat was scratchy from gasping air through my mouth.
“I’m sick,” I croaked at Uncle Henry. Aunt Toosie came to my room on the double. She felt my head and popped a thermometer in my mouth.
“Close your mouth, dear. Don’t bite the thermometer!”
“I can’t breathe through my nose!” I cried in a panic.
“Don’t talk! You’ll bite the thermometer!” She took it out. “It registers one whole degree above normal already! Stay in bed and I’ll call the doctor. What in the world could you have?”
I knew what I had. I had a terrible cold from driving around with a wet head. Besides the cold symptoms, I had a miserable all-over feeling of hating myself.
I tried to tune in on Aunt Eveline, but she was out. If only I could go back in time. Instead of wasting my days plotting how to get Leonard to notice me, I would answer Tom’s letter. I would tell him all the things he wanted to know, like how his dog was getting along. I would, of course, have been paying more attention to Pumpkin, taking him for a daily walk and giving him bones, and I’d tell Tom how much the football team needed him back, how Harold said he was the best wide receiver they’d ever had, and I’d tell him how happy his mother was that he was doing so well in school up there, and how contented his Uncle Malvern was with the progress he was making on his invention. Naturally, I would be able to say I’d visited Uncle Malvern as often as I could when I wasn’t working at my drawing, practicing to be a famous artist.
“Remorse,” said Aunt Eveline.
“Remorse?”
“Remorse is closely akin to self-pity.” How often Aunt Eveline’s words had blown past me unnoticed as a breeze. “If you don’t change your ways, what good is remorse?”
“I will change my ways! Aunt Eveline, I’ll reform! I’ll put on a new spirit just like Sister Maurice says. I’ll act grown-up and devote myself to art!”
“What did you say, dear?” Aunt Toosie asked, pushing my door open with her hip because in one hand she was carrying a tremendous glass of orange juice over crushed ice and in the other, a small glass chuck full of—milk of magnesia.
“I said, maybe it’s my appendix!” I put my hand on my stomach. “Aunt Eveline used to say you’re not supposed to take milk of magnesia if you have a stomachache.”
Aunt Toosie paused. “You didn’t say you had a stomachache!”
“Ah-de-la-eed! The truth, please!” I heard Aunt Eveline distinctly.
“My stomach’s okay, Aunt Eveline, I’ve paid for my sins.” I gulped down the milk of magnesia and put the orange juice