Outside In (10 page)

When we come back, I told myself, things will be different. We’ll all be back at school, and Pete and Dave and Uncle Joe will settle down.

We’ll have a nice time away, I told myself, and when
Mom gets home, she’ll see our cherry-sweet house and love it again and want to stay here. And Wendy Boland will come out of the woods where she’s been camping out like that boy in
My Side of the Mountain
and fall into her parents’ arms.

If only that was what happened.

W
ASHINGTON ON
L
ABOR
D
AY WEEKEND WAS HOT AND STILL.
Aimée loved it. She said that the white monuments were like wedding cakes or the kind of sand castle she wished she could build. She wanted to fly kites on the hot long green mall and look at herself in the creepy reflecting pools. She wanted a tiny lit-up Capitol Building or White House. She wanted to climb on everything. She wanted a flag with an elf on it, to fly over her elf house the way President Johnson flew a flag over the White House.

I liked the big pendulum in the Smithsonian and the money factory and the elevator in the Washington Monument. I didn’t like the heat and the walking and the blisters.

Every building in Washington—every statue!—had writing on it that you had to stop and read. Everything was stiff and quiet and was built in memory of somebody dead. I had had too much news of Washington this year to take being there calmly.

Mom, who would rather have been home soaking her feet, tried to look as though she were having a decent time.
So did I, at first. I worked on staying a little bit ahead of Aimée—or, anyway, not far behind her—as she bounced over walls and steps and the rims of the reflecting pools and in and out of the heavy trees that stood at the edges of the plazas and parks. She didn’t read anything, she didn’t listen to anything Dad or Mom told her about the places, and she wasn’t worried, for once in her life.

On the afternoon of our second day we went to Arlington Cemetery. Mom stayed near me, rubbing tears off her cheeks, and told me about things: the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy’s grave, the newer marker nearby for his brother Bobby, and the view—as if a grave needed a view—down to the Lincoln Memorial and to the Washington Monument and the Capitol beyond.

“It’s a big cross, see?” Mom said. “We’re one point, the Capitol is another, and the Washington Monument is the center. The other arm has the Jefferson Memorial at one end and the White House at the other.” I turned to see the thousands of white crosses across the rolling hills of Arlington, one for each soldier who had died. My heart hurt.

“What did we have to come here for?” I asked. “It’s not fun or anything.”

Mom slipped her arm through mine. “Cher, you’ve been delivering all those papers. You’re getting so smart and curious. Dad thought you’d like it. It’s good to understand your country.”

I was silent. In Washington nothing was just there. Everything meant something. Nothing just was.

Then they dragged us to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Unknown, Dad said, because he couldn’t be identified. “Why not?” asked Aimée. I told her to shut up and walked away to keep from hearing Mom or Dad answer
her. It also shocked me to find out that there were several unknown soldiers. They added bodies or whatever was in there for each war.

We were supposed to watch a ceremony, the changing of the guard, where one guard went away and a new one came to patrol in his place. I didn’t see what the big deal was and didn’t want to stay there any longer than necessary. When Aimée got the giggles because the soldiers were so stiff and stuffy, I was so jumpy that I joined in. Poor Dad couldn’t get us to shut up, although he made us turn our backs to hide our faces and stifle our laughter.

Suddenly a guard turned and walked straight toward us. He stopped in front of us, and said sharply, officially, “Silence must be maintained at all times at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier out of respect for the dead.” We shut up. We didn’t start up again until we were back in the car.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you two girls,” Dad said tensely, his face dark. He didn’t, or couldn’t, go on.

“Who would want to be the unknown soldier?” Aimée asked.

“Nobody wants to be, stupid,” I snapped.

“It’s a great honor for any soldier to be buried in Arlington Cemetery,” Dad said.

“What do they care?” I asked. “They’re dead.”

“Because they gave their lives for their country,” Mom said. I thought she sounded overly serious. Mom and Dad both were on the verge of making a speech, so I quickly ducked the subject. We were crossing the river again, back into the city.

“What’s that building?” had already proved to be an easy gambit because even if Mom and Dad didn’t know, they started trying to figure it out. They looked for signs or
titles or clues like the symbols in the architecture, such as the scales of justice on the Supreme Court building.

Mom and Dad knew where they were from the map, even knew how to get to a neighborhood beyond the Capitol building, where there were signs of the burning and riots that had happened after King’s and Kennedy’s assassinations in the spring. “What are we here to see?” Aimée asked, looking out the car windows at the hot sidewalks and apartment buildings with fire escapes, some kids spraying each other with a hose, just in their shorts, not even bathing suits.

Mom didn’t answer at first, just made us look, pointing out boarded-up stores, a skateboard go-cart, a cat on a fire escape, a grandmother calling down from a window to a kid in the street. Under a shady tree, on the sidewalk, a girl my age sat playing jacks by herself. “We wanted you to see how lucky you are to live in a place where this kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling indignant.

“Would you want to live in this neighborhood?” Dad asked.

“No,” said Aimée.

“Why not?” I asked. An odd shaking began in my stomach.

“Come on, Cher,” said Dad.

“Why should I feel lucky to be safe, if somebody else … those kids … aren’t?”
BIAFRAN HUNGER CRISIS WORST FOR YOUNG
.

They shut up for once. That day was the start of something new in me. I could tell that Mom and Dad, especially Dad, wanted me to feel different things about Washington from what I was feeling. I could see that I was supposed to feel sort of solemn, or patriotic, or interested in certain
places in Washington, and I found I couldn’t get into the appropriate mood.

All of a sudden I looked over at my little sister. Tears were coming down her cheeks. At first I thought she wished she had jacks or something like that. But it was not like Aimée not to ask. Was she afraid of something? What could she be afraid of? Not typical Aimée car things, like whether I’d get my arm taken off hanging it out the window, or whether the tunnel under Baltimore Harbor was really going to cave in when we drove through, the way I’d told her. She wasn’t letting anybody know she was crying, not sniffling or sobbing. She was just looking out the window at this cheerful-enough neighborhood, and tears were coming down.

I didn’t tell Mom and Dad. I reached over and held her hand. Aimée scooched over, leaned her head on my arm, closed her eyes.

I thought about how Dave once told me that his father didn’t get along with Uncle Sam. I was proud of Dad for making helicopters that helped our soldiers fight in Vietnam. Was there any other way to feel about that? Thinking alone in the car (even though everybody else was there) gave me goose bumps. I rubbed them off and asked, “What’s Uncle Joe going to do about Pete?”

Even though Dad was driving, he whipped his head around to look at me in the backseat. Then he looked at Mom. Neither of them said anything. Neither of them answered my question.

After that a lot of things went wrong in Washington, and most of them were because of me. My heart was beating too fast or something. My thoughts were crazy.

I hooted, “Whooo!” in the whispering gallery of the
Capitol, just to see how it sounded, and got scolded by a guard.

I insisted on running down the 555 steps at the Washington Monument, and I would have been fine if I hadn’t slipped and fallen the whole last flight, skinning my shin and bruising my knee so that it turned black, green, and yellow.

Then I slammed my finger in a sliding door at the White House and had to be taken outside to sit under a holly bush with Mom until the sick feeling of hurt in my finger subsided. “Just sit there and think,” Mom told me, fed up. So I did.

Dad took Aimée inside to see the rooms, and Mom and I sat on a little bench. I was waiting for Mom to read me the riot act (Aunt Bonnie’s name for it). I sucked on my hurt finger and wished my heart would stop pounding so hard.

Mom sat with her arms crossed and her knees crossed, shaking her foot so hard her little red flat fell off. I picked it up and slipped it back on her foot. Her stomach was almost too big for her to see her feet.

“Would it still be Kennedy living here?” I asked Mom. “I mean, if he was still president, if he wasn’t—”

“Absolutely,” Mom said. I was thinking about a photograph I’d seen of John and Caroline Kennedy, little kids when their father was killed. Now they must be about as old as I was.

“Where are his kids?” I asked.

“With their mother,” Mom said. She looked as if she wanted to kick me with her swinging foot.

“Mom?” I said, standing up. “Let’s go look in the gift shop.”

There was a book in there about John F. Kennedy. I
found the picture of John-John and Caroline and the story about their father’s assassination on a sunny day in Texas.

I wanted to put the book down. Before I could stop myself, I was reading a page that compared Kennedy with Abraham Lincoln. They had a lot in common, everything from the fact that both their vice presidents were named Johnson to the fact that Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln and Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy. It was horrible. The shaky feeling came into my stomach again.

“Something happy now,” Mom said to Dad when he and Aimée came out. So we went to the zoo next, and all afternoon I was relieved to think about animals rather than people.

That night after dinner we went back to the monuments because, Mom said, “They’re so beautiful at night.” Dad didn’t want to, but Mom said, “Please, Pat. I need soothing.”

We parked at the Washington Monument and stood looking at the city from the white point that rose from its center. The sky above the monument was purplish blue all the way down to the ground. The grass shone glossy in the dim light, and the reflecting pool threw a picture of the sky up toward us, making the walkway around it black in contrast. It
was
soothing. Aimée ran into the blackness, yelling to make it echo, and I chased her along the side of the pool, heading toward the Lincoln Memorial.

Dad and Mom didn’t call us back but wandered along behind us, their voices echoing so that I did not feel alone when Aimée got ahead of me. I passed strangers in the dark, other tourists. I tried to imagine that this was just another game of hide-and-seek, that the people in the gloaming were no more threatening than Pete Asconti
used to be. Where the park ended and the road swirled in front of us, I caught up with Aimée.

We waited for Mom and Dad. Behind us little red lights blinked on top of the Washington Monument, warning the airplanes. The reflecting pool held mist and stars and the pale green glow from the lights that dotted the paths.

We crossed and climbed the steps. In front of us sat Abraham Lincoln, resting magnificently the way a lion does, in golden light, in a big armchair. Aimée and I stood and looked at him, at the headlights and taillights of the cars streaming past. Mom came up beside us, looked up at Lincoln, and caught her breath. “The best thing of all,” she said.

Lincoln’s face was so old, sweet, and almost lonesome. Here was the one everybody loved best of all, I thought, the old grandfather, more than the Kennedys up there on the hill.

Dad made us stand and listen while he read the words on all the walls. “I’m going out, okay?” Aimée announced, ants in her pants. I wondered if she was feeling the way I was, not wanting to feel whatever I was supposed to feel. Mom and Dad barely answered, standing with their hands laced together, looking at Lincoln. I went after Aimée.

Outside, Aimée began running along the top step of the memorial, in and out of the fat white columns that held up the roof. I wished she would come back. I paced along nervously behind her, following her singing voice, wishing I could see her every minute. The front of each column was bathed in golden-white light. The back of each column was dim, and as Aimée got farther from the entrance of the memorial, the area behind the columns grew dimmer until it was almost pitch-dark back there.

Everything felt backward. Aimée was running off,
doing something risky, and I was hanging back, getting anxious.

Cars whizzed by, circling the memorial and the Tidal Basin. The lights were on at the Jefferson Memorial, and I could see the figure of the statue of Jefferson standing looking out. Somewhere nearby, someone called out in the dark, “See up there? That’s where the eternal flame is.”