Ms. Hempel Chronicles (18 page)

“Like, emotionally?” Maggie asked, full of sincerity, far more tractable as a pupil than she ever was as a sibling. “I get good self-esteem. Is that what you mean? And cooperation and problem solving and self-respect.” Looking at her final sentence, she added neatly: “Joy. A lot of joy”

Beatrice took a breath. “All of those reasons are certainly broad.” She glanced down at the notebook page on which her sister was steadfastly transcribing her ideas. The cliches, nothing if not resilient, were massing once again; perhaps more drastic approach was required. “Now let's try going deeper, too. Let’s try finding some darkness, some interesting conflict.”

“Conflict like how?" Maggie asked. “You mean fights backstage?

“Well, that’s one sort, but I was thinking of the more internal kind”

Beatrice deliberated, but only briefly, then raised an unseen hand and placed it over the tiny hidden camera.

"And by internal, I mean the conflict you feel as a theater tech. The inner conflict. Doing all that hard work, but never really getting recognized. Not getting the appreciation you deserve. Having to stay in the wings the whole time.”

Maggie had stopped writing, but she was still gazing at the half-filled page, as if she had found a menacing pattern there Beatrice’s voice rose slightly. "Who spends all those hours painting and hammering and sawing? You do! But do you get to come out and take a bow? Do you get the applause?” Maggie looked up. “At the curtain call, the actors point to us and we stick out our heads and wave.”

The uncombed heads popping out, and the shy, puckish, manic waving—Beatrice could see it perfectly.

"That’s nice,” she said. "That really is. Those moments of recognition can feel wonderful." And she meant it, too—she did—but how could she help-but also mention the injustice, the indignity, of being always the stagehand but never the star, always on tiptoe, the gentle mover and fixer, condemned to forever facilitate the dazzling achievements of someone else? Not too different, she saw, from her own line of work. On some days, at least. So she should know! "It just sounds hard to me,” said Beatrice.

Maggie tapped her pencil against the kitchen table rapidly. It was clear that something had begun to stir and glow inside her, as hoped. The slow bubbling of ambivalence? The surfacing of secret trouble? Maggie finally held her pencil still. Without looking from her notebook, she said, “So you want me to write that I don’t like being a theater tech?"

Surprised, Beatrice realized it was merely resentment she’d seen stirring, with herself as its object.

"Oh, Maggie, that’s not what I mean. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. I don’t want to take something you love and turn it into something horrible. I just wanted to help you explore the ways in which this experience might be complicated

“Not everything is complicated.”

“But it is! It is!” cried Beatrice. “At least it is in writing. In good, interesting writing. Which is exactly what you’re capable of, and what they’ll be looking for in your essay” ;

She thought with despair of the small masterpiece that Emily Radinsky had turned in as her last book report, a sixteen-page first-person narrative imagined from the perspective of a minor character in Elie Wiesel’s Night. It was so beautifully written, so profound in its understanding of family and loss, so simply and astonishingly great, that Beatrice had wept when she read it. She could almost weep now, just thinking of it, and looking at her earnest, resentful, circuit-breaking sister, and knowing how the good people in charge of enrichment programs everywhere would be banging down Emily’s door, and not hers.

“Okaysaid Beatrice, brightly. “Forget complicated. Let’s try thinking about this from a different angle.”

With a soft rustle of paper, Maggie turned to a new page.

As a very young child, she had been a biter. This was a source of consternation to her mother, developmental interest to her father, and to Beatrice, bottomless delight, serving as it did as proof of the baby’s badass nature, and augury of trans-gressive acts to come. She liked to think that Maggie’s early exposure to excellent and angry music had possibly played a role. Not just in terms of the biting itself but also, gratifyingly, in the general lack of remorse. “I bite Eli,’’ Maggie would announce upon arriving home from the playground. "I bite Josh. I bite Georgie. I bite Priya.” Sometimes she’d try to bite Beatrice, too, her chin jutting forward and a wild look coming into her eyes, but this did not in any way diminish Beatrices enthusiasm. She just learned to move quickly out of reach; the attacks were swift and for the most part unpredictable. “1 bite Mama,” Maggie would say. "I bite Calvin.” Looking on mildly from the sofa, their father said, “The real question is, what is she trying to tell us?”

Maybe she was trying to say, My teeth hurt. My T-shirt is scratchy. I don’t want to wait my turn for the slide. I’m sick of the park, of the trees, of the picnic benches. I’m tired of sunshine and shade, of pita bread in plastic bags. I’m sick of my car, my yard, my crib, my house, and the friendly, baffled people who live there. The strange smell embedded in the carpet. The long dark painting above the fireplace. The breathless feeling in the air, as if everyone were about to turn around and disappear. All of them: the boy peering at his turtle in the tank, the girl clattering down the stairs and singing at the top of her lungs, the man hovering in the doorway, finger tucked in a half-closed book, and the woman making fireworks explode in the huge battered woks that teeter on the stove. Noisy, large, and omnipresent—so why does it feel as if one day they might all disappear?

Maggie clamped down on her father's salty forearm. Beatrice laughed. Calvin grimaced. Mama said something reproving. It was directed at Beatrice, not the biter. ‘ Why did you bite Papa?” asked their father, looking into the eyes of the little girl. “Can you use your words and tell Papa?” Maggie pulled away and careened across the room with perfect indifference as Beatrice watched dumbly in wonder and envy. She had been plotting her own minor rebellions for years and had yet to cultivate this cavalier air. She would never be truly punk rock. She worried too much about making other people cross with her. Her hair was a police-light blue, her ears sparkling with hardware, her boots heavy enough to stomp someone senseless, and she still couldn’t bring herself to spit out her gum on the sidewalk. Nobody likes a litterbug, she heard a voice saying. Fuck you! she told the voice, who simply chuckled. And now her mother was mad at her. Unbearable. Her blackhaired, smooth-limbed, no-nonsense mother. What had she said? "You’re making this harder." Or maybe, “You're not helping.” Not cruel or cutting words, exactly, but enough to make you wither inside, especially when spoken by the person who was cooking you dinner, as she had every night for the past how many years, her silky arms scarred from the sputtering oil, scars that on anyone else would be mistaken for freckles.

But if given a choice, Beatrice would take disapproval— I which was at least familiar, brisk, and suitably maternal— over the weird stare with which her mother now regarded her when she got home from school. As if Beatrice wasn’t even her child anymore. Her mother would get this look in her eye—this stunned look—and she would gaze up at Beatrice hopefully, like she wasn't Beatrice at all but a neighbor’s nice kid, a teenage babysitter come to the rescue. As if her very arrival meant that her mother could pick up her purse, point to the emergency list on the fridge, put on some lipstick, and vvalk out the door. Don't worry; the baby’s sleeping. Calling over her shoulder. Beatrice dreaded this look. It made her feel queasy. It made her want to do the stupidest, most hopelessly unpunk rock thing—which was to screw up her face and cry, Mama COME BACK.

Their mother was outside in the cold, calling their names. She needed help. Beatrice looked out the kitchen window and saw her in the middle of the frozen yard, deep in contemplation of the gazebo. What was she holding? Was that really a hatchet? In the distance, the door to the toolshed gaped open. Maggie was already flying out the back door, red parka flapping. Their mother stalked around the little structure, her gardening clogs bright against the gray turf, her small black head covered entirely by the crocheted cloche hat that Maggie had produced in a fit of craftiness. Beatrice owned one, too, but didn’t remember where she had put it Slowly she followed her sister outside, wanting no part in any of this.

One hand occupied with the hatchet, Mama was using the other to grasp the yew bushes by the neck and shake them in an uncharitable way. They grew shaggily at the foot of the gazebo, loyal but disheveled sentries, planted there years before. It seemed that Mama had decided now was the moment to relieve them of their duties. When Beatrice, shivering in her swingy little car coat, suggested that the spring might be a better time, her mother said, “Who knows when you’ll be coming home next?” and with a heavy feeling Beatrice realized that a definite and as yet undisclosed list, including such items as essay revision and tree removal, had been compiled in preparation for her visit.

"Don’t you have anything more practical to wear?” her mother asked, looking askance at the car coat, and the only thing Beatrice could think to say was, "I’ve always liked those bushes. They just need to be pruned.”

"They’re hideous!” Maggie said, and for emphasis kicked at some lower branches with her sneaker. “We’re going to plant wisteria instead. The vines will climb up over the roof and look romantic.”

“It’s a business decision. The bushes have a lot of spiders in them. They make the whole place feel dark.” Mama tested the blade of the hatchet with her fingertip. “No one’s going to want to eat breakfast sitting next to those bushes.”

Beatrice didn’t know what her mother was talking about. She felt both outwitted and outnumbered, but wasn’t ready yet to admit her disadvantage. Meanwhile, Maggie hopped about on the hard ground, waving her arms in the air as she draped the gazebo with prospective vines. “Maybe, if they’re really beautiful, we can increase our rates.”

She jigged some more, her fingers twitching in the happy act of counting money. She glanced coyly at Bieatrice. “Maybe we’ll even charge you for a visit.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said their mother. It was unclear whether she meant the rate hike or the new policy regard* ing family members. In possible consolation she told Beatrice* “I'm going to find you some good work gloves,” and headed off in the direction of the toolshed.

“Charge me?” Beatrice looked at her sister.

Tm only teeeeeeasing!” Maggie shrieked, and jigged even faster, full of plans. Little seashell soaps! Little tiny bottles of shampoo! And extra towels, folded at the foot of the bed. Foil-wrapped chocolates to be placed on the pillows. Didn’t

that sound cozy? She swung gleefully around a gazebo port. There’d be discounts for repeat guests. An added charge during graduation week. But you also had to factor in the 10 percent finder’s fee that went automatically to the agency....

Beatrice tried to focus. She asked, "Are you talking about an inn?”

“A bed-and-breakfast!” corrected Maggie. She then added soberly, “To open an inn, we’d need to get a special license, and those cost a lot of money."

“We?”

“Me and Mama. We’re business partners. Fifty-fifty”

"Good grief,” said Beatrice, and wondered how long the two of them had been in cahoots. Probably forever. She imagined coming home again and finding them doing tai chi in their matching pajamas. A terrible joke And which was more distressing—their merry collusion or the thought of strange people traipsing about her house, putting their feet up on the furniture? She felt, for a moment, an instinctive Victorian horror of one's family being in trade. She feared that the particular trade of hospitality would sink one even farther. Maybe they should just take in sewing, she thought miserably, picturing her sister's long, chapped, but clever fingers flying above a seam. But how could she harbor such detestable ideas? When had she become such a nervous little snob? She had aspired to anarchism once, or at least to a Billy Bragg sort of socialism. She’d made a romance out of what she called “regular people” who were experts at living what she called “normal life.” Pickup trucks, domestic beer—delicious! At those punk rock shows on Sunday afternoons, she would lie about where she went to school, ashamed of the grassy quads and classes in French cinema. When asked, she would most often name the

very school where Maggie, soon enough, would be walking through the battle-scarred doors. At a certain age, Beatrice had longed to go there herself.

"Look what I found!” their mother called, coming toward them and waving a handsaw. She looked pretty and rosy from the cold and Beatrice felt her heart lurch painfully.

“Are you planning to use my room?” she found herself asking, to her own dismay. This was not at all what she had wanted to say, especially in a voice that sounded high-pitched and sulky. “Using it as part of your business?”

Her mother frowned. "Beatrice, sweetheart. That room is always yours to stay in, whenever you want. You know that.” She held out a pair of crusty gardening gloves.

“Are strangers going to be sleeping there?” The sulky voice persisted. “Don’t you think that’s risky, considering all the valuable things around?”

An opening: her mother nimbly leaped. All those old magazines, she said—they were a serious fire hazard. All those little knickknacks and photos gathering dust on the bookshelves. And what was Beatrice still keeping in her drawers? Certainly nothing she’d ever think of wearing again. In fact, her mother had picked up some empty cartons at the liquor store, and was hoping that over the weekend they could make a trip to the drop-off bin outside the church.

A little box floated beside another item on the list, waiting to be firmly checked.

“That’s archival material, Mama!” The fanzines, the flyers, the packet of ketchup given to her by the drummer from the Volcano Suns. Her first leather jacket. Her first plaid schoolgirl skirt, pleated and saucy. Her first piece of black velvet, held together by safety pins. “You expect me to give away my Sister shirt?”