Not the End of the World (4 page)

They never do, in the stories. They’re always gracious and magnanimous, as if it never bothered them that for twenty years people said they were crazy and treated them like dirt and laughed at them. I didn’t believe that Thomas Edison, who used to work for the railroad right here in North Bay and even blew up a baggage car he was using for experiments, never once laughed and said, “Guess I showed those dumbheads.”

It wasn’t easy to find someone like that. Maybe hundreds of thousands of hero-type people had felt that way, but nobody came out and said it, at least not in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. It was easy to be gracious once the world was knocking at your door, bestowing gifts and titles and love, but what about all those years when they weren’t? Back before the person was a hero and they had to endure all the name-calling and the shunning and the poverty and the ridicule, the years when they’d walk around in threadbare coats, with their scrawny children shivering in their unheated houses, while all the neighbors stared and called them kooks? I didn’t believe they didn’t think, I’ll show
them!
How else could they keep going? How else could they keep believing in themselves while everybody else was giggling at them behind their curtains?

“That’s what makes them heroes,” Mother said, but what a bunch of bull-hudda. I didn’t think they were doing anybody any favors by being big about it. How were people supposed to learn, if they kept plodding along, century after century,
despising anyone they didn’t understand, making them suffer, and then, when they finally realized the person was right all along, being forgiven like a two-year-old? Why was it that the heroes were the ones who had to be tolerant, instead of the idiots who tormented them? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if the heroes said, “Look at what stupid boobies you are!” and made the people feel bad, so they’d hang their heads in shame and think about it and then look at themselves and say, “Well, gee, maybe I
was
a booby. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.”

“I don’t know where you come up with these things,” Mother said when I told her I was thinking of choosing Julius Caesar to be my hero. “Can’t you choose someone a little more
reasonable?”

Like who, I asked. Well, someone more recent. Someone more admirable. “After all,” she said knowingly, “he had an
affair.”

I felt it was my duty to defend him. “He was a great statesman,” I said. “He was a great general. He built roads all the way to England! He developed a calendar. He’s got a month named after him. He cleaned up a corrupt system of government. He practically ruled the world!”

“But what does that have to do with you?” Mother wanted to know. “You couldn’t even stick out Brownies. How do you expect to rule the world?”

I told her I didn’t
want
to rule the world and she wanted to know why I was choosing Julius Caesar then. Wasn’t I supposed to choose someone I wanted to
be
like? I sighed and said I just wanted someone heroic to write about for stupid summer school and I couldn’t think of anyone and when Mr. Blake said, “Maggie! Who is your hero?” Julius Caesar was just the first person who popped into my head. “He had fits,” I told Mother. “He was an epileptic and still he was able to be an emperor.”

“You’re not epileptic, thank God,” she said. “What does that have to do with you?”

“Nothing,” I said and she said she thought I chose him to spite her, just because she wouldn’t let me see “that godawful movie.”

“It is not,” I said and that was the truth. I’d already seen it; Ginger Moore and I sneaked in through the exit door at the Ottawa Theater and watched almost the whole thing and I didn’t see what was so awful about it except Liz Taylor wore see-through togas.

Daddy thought it was funny. He talked about having been to the Coliseum and Ruthie kept interrupting to tell us her hero was Beep-Beep, the cartoon road runner. Donald said his hero was Al Kaline and Mother wanted to know why I couldn’t have chosen Amelia Earhart; Amelia Earhart would have been a good hero for me.

“But she’s dead!” I cried.

“So is Julius Caesar,” she said.

“Yeah, but he didn’t just
disappear,”
I said, starting to feel all panicky and tight, as if I might burst into tears and I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t cry in front of her, I couldn’t let her know she’d got to me. “He didn’t get in his plane and crash and
disappear!”

“That’s true,” Mother said, poking the ends of her corn cob with the little plastic holders. “His friends murdered him.”

I was outraged. She wanted me to disappear. She wanted me to get in a plane and fly off and never return. She could put a picture of me up on the mantel and point to it when the Bridge Ladies came over. “And that,” she could say, sobbing ever so lightly, “was Maggie. She went on an adventure and never came back.”

It was what I’d always suspected, but I didn’t expect her to be so blatant about it. Didn’t she just say she thought I should choose someone I wanted to
be?
A zillion heroes in
the world from which to pick and my own mother wants me to pick the one who plops in the ocean and is never heard from again.

Ruthie started crying; she thought someone was going to kill me. “Maggie’s gonna be murdered in an airplane!” she blubbered. “Who will be my sister?”

“Now look what you’ve done,” Mother said and I couldn’t believe it.

“Me!? All I said was I chose Julius Caesar as my subject for a stupid paper for stupid summer school.
You’re
the one who brought up Amelia Earhart!”

“And
you’re
the one who brought up plane crashes!”

Donald started giggling and Ruthie began to flap her arms and Mother started to cry. “I can’t do
anything
right!” she sniffled, tossing her corn on the plate and sending the butter splattering. “I can’t say
anything
around here!”

Daddy thumped the table and said, “All right, all right, let’s stop this caterwauling and eat.”

I couldn’t believe she was being so obvious about it, right in front of Daddy. And what was
he
doing, sitting there grinning and bemused, as if he didn’t notice? She’d always wanted me to disappear-from the moment I was born, she wanted to be rid of me and I wasn’t just making it up, I knew it. I even heard her once, talking to Mrs. Tucker on the phone and crying because she couldn’t “control” me and she
admitted
it, kind of. She was talking about Grandmother, and how Grandmother used to come over and tell her what a lousy mother she was and what a lousy housekeeper she was. “I wanted to prove to her that I could be a good mother,” Mother told Mrs. Tucker. “I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t like
her.”
I felt sorry for her when she said that and I almost ran into the room to jump on her lap and hug her, but then her voice got all hard and nasty and she said, “But that
child was uncontrollable from the day she was born. It was almost as if she was trying to make me look bad in front of Mother.”

So that was how I knew. And maybe she was right, maybe it
would
be better for her if I did just disappear into some ocean. But I still wasn’t going to have Amelia Earhart as a hero.

W
HAT
a mess. Here I was, stuck in summer school with all the delinquents and dumbheads, having to write a paper about some dead emperor I didn’t even like.

I looked out at the Lake, at all the sailboats skimming by with their spinnakers billowing out like gigantic balloons, and I wished I could swim across the Lake, just jump into the cool, clear blue and swim and swim until I could no longer see our beach, no longer see the shoreline, until I could look back and see only a memory of North Bay.

I would be the first person to do it—the first person ever to swim across a Great Lake! Even though I knew it was impossible—I’d never even made it past second sandbar—I thought I’d like to try it. What a glory it would be! I could be my own hero and everyone would admire me; my parents would be proud of me and I’d be forgiven. Well, if not forgiven, at least redeemed. “Oh!” they’d say when they saw me on television, exhausted but jubilant. “She wasn’t crazy, she was just special.”

“What makes you think you’re so special?” Grandmother endlessly asked. “Who put you on that high horse?” “Just who do you think you are?” Mother would want to know, putting on her Grandmother voice. “You’re heading for a fall.” Even Daddy would get in on the act: “Don’t start thinking you’re special,” he’d warn, reminding me that the party I was having was paid for out of
his
pocket.

But why
wasn’t
I supposed to think I was special? I didn’t get it. We were supposed to excel, and to excel is to be special, but if we weren’t supposed to want to be special, how then were we supposed to excel? “Goodness is its own reward,” Mother said, but what did that have to do with wanting to be special? Nothing happened when you were good; you became invisible, mute, you did what you were told and melted into everybody else and I hated that. I hated it more than getting kicked out of class for being “unruly,” hated it more than the hours I spent sitting on the filthy floor in that dark old hall, counting doorknobs and getting my skirt all grimy. I hated it more than I hated being yelled at; more than I hated having to spend three hours a week with a social worker; more than I hated being banished to my room. Being good meant being placid and there was something in me that just refused to follow along like a zombie.

“You just do things to be different,” Mother said, but what was so wrong with that? I thought we were
supposed
to be special, and I guessed that was OK as long as you were special in the way they wanted you to be: if you were a Champion Speller or Miss Teenage America or something. But if you weren’t, watch out! They’d call you a Communist or a homo; they’d run you out of town, like poor Mr. Hilliard, who lost his job as County Clerk just because he spoke Russian. “He might be a
spy!”
everybody said, as if the Russians cared about who got married in North Bay. I knew Mr. Hilliard
and he was a very nice man; whenever he’d see Goober and me out walking on the beach he’d invite us in and tell us stories about North Bay history. He lived in the last house on Beach Street, just before the coastguard property, which probably didn’t help his case much. Like maybe he was keeping track of how many times the lighthouse light went around in an hour or something strategic like that.

It was dangerous to be different, at least if you were different in a way that wasn’t approved by the world. I wanted to be part of the world, but I didn’t want to get lost in it. I didn’t want to be an indistinguishable ingredient in some cake batter, all swirled around and mixed in with the rest; I wanted to be a raisin or a walnut, always keeping my own identity even though I was part of the cake. Mother laughed when I told her that—she thought it was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. But at the same time she looked kind of sad and lost, as if she knew exactly what I meant and just didn’t want to admit that being the baking soda wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

I wondered what would happen if I tried to swim the Lake. It seemed as if I could do it, if I really tried, if I just kept going instead of turning back when I got tired. “Don’t go past second sandbar alone,” Mother always warned. “A boy from Riverside got run over by an outboard between sandbars.” But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my limits; I knew when to turn back, when I had just enough energy left to get back to safety. Each time I tried, I got closer and closer to third sandbar—I could feel the water growing colder as the Lake floor dipped deeply, then growing warmer again as I neared third. I’m close, I’d think and take a deep breath and drop myself straight down, like an anchor, to see if my upraised hands would feel air while my toes wriggled on the slick rocks. But it was always over my hands, too deep to continue, so I’d turn back.

“I wonder if Julius Caesar had a miserable childhood,” I asked Goob, and she climbed into my lap. I suppose he did, what with his epileptic fits and all. His parents must have been beside themselves every time he flopped down on the floor and started writhing around like a hooked fish. “I just don’t know what we’re going to do about Julie,” his mother must have moaned, pulling out her hair and rending her toga. “I can’t
control
him!” “I don’t know what gets into you, young man,” his father probably said. “If you don’t shape up we’ll have to send you to Gladiator School.”

I had copied all the information from the encyclopedia but I didn’t know what to do with it. There were certain things that weren’t very heroic about Julius; for instance, he was big on pillage and plunder and in Gaul he captured a village and then cut off everybody’s hands so they couldn’t raise arms against him. I thought that was kind of drastic, even for barbarians.

I looked down at my notebook, not knowing what to say. It didn’t really matter; I was a delinquent, not a dumbhead, and my grade didn’t even count. But everything I did had to be perfect or Margaret would have a fit. She went crazy if I so much as got an A—. She’d run out in the hall and start scratching my arms until she drew blood, to punish me for not getting it right. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she’d say, scratching like mad, and Mr. Blake called my parents and told them there was something wrong with me. “Nonsense,” Daddy said, “she’s just competitive. It’s a good quality to have in this world. And look at it this way, at least she doesn’t scratch anyone
else.”