Little Red Lies Read online

  “Army-issue. They always go big on the shirts. Anybody mind if Mary and I go for a walk?”

  Of course we mind, but before Mother can discourage it, Dad says, “Go ahead, son. You two need a chance to catch up.” Mother sighs audibly, but it’s too late. They’re already standing and pushing in their chairs.

  “Can I come, too?” I know the answer will be a loud and blunt no and steel myself for it.

  Jamie pokes his head back into the dining room. “Not this time, Rache,” he says gently.

  I think my mouth is hanging open like a character in a cartoon. He wasn’t normally this kind before the war. My formerly vicious lips, now merely a pinkish smudge, turn up in an almost smile. War sure changes people.

  “Thanks again for dinner, Mrs. McLaren,” Mary calls. We hear the hangers jangle as she gets her coat from the hall closet.

  When the door shuts behind them, I ask to be excused and go to the living room window. Our street, Wakefield, is like a stage subtly lit to resemble evening. I know a thing or two about stages because I’m in the school drama club. My dream is to act.

  Jamie’s arm is around Mary’s shoulders. Hers should be around his waist, but it isn’t. They spend a long time looking into each other’s eyes before Mary looks away. I direct them to walk toward the streetlight, where they will be bathed in its golden glow, and they do.

  “Snow,” I whisper. As if on cue, snow feathers lightly from on high. This must be what it’s like to write a play or direct one. Stage direction: as they move closer to the streetlight, he bends down and she raises her face. They kiss.

  And they do. They kiss while snow falls on their heads and shoulders, and I let them until … until a little pang of longing says that’s enough. Move along, I direct. And they do. The power of the director! What’s wrong with the scene is the casting. Mary isn’t the right girl.

  It isn’t until the next morning that I have a chance to get Jamie all to myself. I knock on his bedroom door, and he says, “Come in.” He squints at my hair. “Quite a bird’s nest you’ve got there, kiddo.”

  I have such thick, curly dark hair that it takes me about half an hour to get a brush through it. So, mostly I don’t, until Mother shrieks at me, I’m taking that head of yours, and I’m going to shave it bald if you don’t … blah, blah, blah.

  I’m still in my pajamas, draping myself across the foot of Jamie’s bed. I have lots of questions for him.

  We can hear Mother rattling around downstairs, getting breakfast. Dad’s bringing in the paper from the front veranda. We hear him call to our neighbor Mrs. Hall that Jamie’s home, and Mrs. Hall burbles something back.

  Jamie’s chest is bare, and he draws his knees up, keeping the covers tight across his waist. He still looks like the boy who went away in spite of the dark hair sprouting on his chest. It wasn’t there before, or if it was, I didn’t notice.

  I wonder if he wore his shorts to bed or if he’s completely naked. Mother put his ironed and folded pajamas on the bureau, and they’re still there. If I tried that, Mother would know the instant my naked body slipped between the sheets, and she’d storm into my room with a lecture about personal decency. Every so often, I have the urge to be personally indecent. I’m developing a bosom now, and sometimes I take off all my clothes in front of my mirror just to admire it.

  I sit up. “I’m thinking of writing a play.”

  “That’s nice. About what?”

  “The war. Kind of a romance.”

  “A romance about war?”

  “It’s going to be about a soldier who has to kill the enemy but at the last minute doesn’t, and so he gets shot. But he doesn’t die, and this nurse in a hospital looks after him, and, um …”

  “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me, let me guess—they fall in love.”

  “Yes, actually.” I look down and chew on my thumbnail. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Of course it is. “It sounds stupid!”

  “No, it sounds good. I hope it has a happy ending. After all the bombs and killing and destruction over there, I bet people want happy endings.” That is the most grown-up, sensitive thing he’s ever said to me.

  “What was it like, Jamie? I don’t know very much about war.” I hug my knees and scrunch up his top blanket with my bare toes. “What was it like knowing there were boys and men out there who wanted to kill you?”

  “You know, you’ve got eyes just like Granny’s, the way they bore right into a person. If the two of you ever put your joint intensity together, you could tip the world right off its axis.”

  “Tell me,” I say. “I don’t know the first thing about war.”

  “What do you know about love?”

  “I can imagine being in love. War is a different country. I can’t imagine living there.”

  “Sooner or later, I’ll tell you war stories. Right now, I want to shove the war right off the edge of the world.”

  “Jamie, come on …”

  “In a war, it’s like thinking about bullies. You could let yourself be bullied, or you could fight back.”

  “And what else?”

  “I can’t remember what else.”

  “But, how could you forget something like that so soon?”

  He moves down under the covers, pulling them up to his chin. “If you squint your eyes half shut, you don’t see as much. And you don’t remember as much, either. It’s as if everything is only half true.” He draws his brows together. “I suppose you’ll put that in your play.”

  “Maybe.” I probably will, after I have more time to study my brother under my personal microscope of human behavior.

  “Did many soldiers fall in love?”

  “No one I knew. A lot of soldiers died.”

  “When people get shot, is it—not really, but sort of—like a balloon deflating?”

  “No, of course not. I think you’re trying to rewrite my memories.”

  “I’m not.” I scowl at him.

  “I had this friend, Herman Visser.”

  “Was he shot?”

  “Yes. A scrawny guy. Unhappy. Kind of a deflated balloon while he was alive. His family was Dutch, but he had an unfortunate nickname—Herman-the-German.”

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t think so. He had a mother.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  A week later, I turn fourteen, for all the good it does me. I’m still too tall, still too skinny, still scratching my arms raw, and still not allowed to wear lipstick to school.

  The day after my birthday, I have an appointment with the doctor to have my arms examined. We’re hoping that some new ointment has been discovered that will cure me.

  Doctor Melvin’s waiting room walls are plastered with large Dingbat calendars from the Charles E. Frosst drug company. Never mind leafing through boring, outdated LIFE magazines while you wait for the doctor. You can stay amused for hours looking at the cartoon scenes of curious buglike creatures, with antennae coming out of their heads. Some of the Dingbats are dressed as wartime Red Cross doctors and nurses; some carry injured soldier-bugs on stretchers; some wind endless rolls of bandage around the spindly arms and legs of the injured; some lie on cots and get blood transfusions from something that looks like a gas pump. There are also scenes of peacetime hospitals, where Dingbat nurses inject sick Dingbats with giant hypos or spoon medicine down their throats, and Dingbat doctors put casts on broken legs or hover over Dingbat patients on operating tables. And there are Dingbat pharmacists with their pills and medicines, and dentists with their lethal-looking drills. In Dingbat Land, all the little Dingbats get looked after, and I’m pretty sure they all get better.

  There is no new miracle ointment (there would have been in Dingbat Land), so I have to use the same old smelly stuff that doesn’t work very well.

  “One of these days,” Doctor Melvin says, “you’ll outgrow this rash. You’ll see.”

  Besides continuing to scratch my arms, I work a bit on the play I want to write, ev
en though I don’t know the first thing about writing one. I’m starting with the scene under the streetlight with the snow falling. But I bog down trying to write dialogue. And where should I set it? And how do I get the soldier into the war? Writing a play isn’t as easy as it looks.

  School is a series of low points. Drama club drags, mainly because I haven’t been given a part in the play. School sports get along better without me. Nothing is happening in my life.

  It’s first period, Thursday, English, Hamlet’s soliloquy in act 3, scene 1. I’ve memorized it right down to the last comma. I want Mr. Mackiewitz to ask me to recite it because I want to prove I can act.

  Besides being our homeroom teacher, Mr. Mackiewitz is director of the school play. If he sees me dripping with dramatic pathos, maybe I’ll get a part next year.

  But he doesn’t even notice me beaming hopefully at him. He stands at his desk at the front of the classroom, his eyes wide with surprise, as if he can’t believe he’s forgotten the opening words To be, or not to be.… He falls into his chair and slumps over his Hamlet.

  For seven seconds, our class of twenty-one students is in a state of total paralysis, until my friend Ruthie screams.

  Hazel Carrington shouts, “I’ll go get someone!”

  She returns with the math teacher from next door, who checks Mr. Mackiewitz’s pulse. “Somebody run to the office. Get them to call an ambulance!”

  Hazel Carrington, the most responsible student in the class, runs to the principal’s office. The math teacher tells us all to leave quickly and quietly and to wait in the lunchroom until our next class.

  The lunchroom always smells like armpits mixed with either egg salad sandwiches or overripe bananas. Today it’s egg. The air hums with the electricity generated by twenty-one nervous teenagers.

  “Do you think he’ll die?”

  “I think he did. He’s pretty old.”

  “Listen!” We hear the ambulance siren getting closer and then stop. We’re quiet, imagining what’s about to happen.

  “I guess we’ll be getting a supply teacher,” someone says.

  “I wonder if the school play will be canceled,” Hazel Carrington says.

  “The poor guy,” someone thinks to say.

  It was just after Christmas when Mr. Mackiewitz posted the cast list with no sign of my name on it.

  “I know you’re disappointed,” he said to me.

  “I thought my audition went pretty well.”

  “Sorry, I just couldn’t picture you in any of the roles.”

  “But, I know I have great stage potential.”

  “Rachel, my dear,” he said, “it pains me to have to say this, but you have a tendency to overact. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. Of course I knew what he meant. I just didn’t believe him.

  Later, I told Ruthie what he’d said, hoping she would scoff and say, That’s just stupid, and make me feel better. Instead, she said, “Yeah, well, he’s right.”

  “Ruthie! Why are you saying this?”

  “I’m saying it for your own good because you never believe the things you don’t want to be true.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like somebody saying you tend to go way overboard.”

  “That’s just stupid!”

  Last time I ask her to stick up for me.

  “Next year,” Mr. Mackiewitz said back then, “I’ll look very hard for a script that might work for you. If you believe you can act, then we’ll give you all the encouragement in the world.” I brightened a bit at that. “Right now, however, I need you to be the prompter. The job takes someone with a sharp ear and a quick mind, who can concentrate no matter what.”

  Grudgingly, I agreed to do it.

  “And later,” he said, “once we’re into production, I’ll need you to apply makeup.”

  I warmed up a little. Enhancing faces was something I felt I knew something about, the only bright star in the entire blank sky.

  In assembly the next day, the principal announces, “Mr. Mackiewitz has had a severe heart attack. He is being well looked after in hospital, and we are all hoping for his early recovery. We are very lucky that he is still alive.”

  Everyone cheers.

  “We are not expecting him to return to school for quite some time, if at all. Therefore, starting Monday, a supply teacher will take up his duties.”

  The following Monday, a Mr. Tompkins is writing on the blackboard as we straggle into the classroom. He doesn’t turn around until everyone is seated, and oh, my! He is extremely handsome. And he’s young—very young—hardly older than us, it seems.

  Ruthie looks across at me and wiggles her eyebrows. Woo-woo, they say.

  Below desk level, I move my hand back and forth. So-so. I feel a need to remain true to poor old Mackiewitz, a plump, balding man. No one would ever have wiggled so much as a big toe for him.

  There is a general flutter among the girls, a few discreet chest-pattings to show throbbing hearts. The boys stare at us in wonder. One of them snickers.

  “Turn to act 3, scene 1 in Hamlet, please,” Mr. Tompkins says in a warm baritone.

  When we finally move slowly to our next class, Ruthie says, “He’s beyond handsome. He’s an utter dreamboat.”

  Hazel Carrington screams, “He’s way more than a dreamboat,” and quickly plasters both hands over her mouth, afraid he might have heard.

  I just keep walking. “Yeah, sure,” I say. “I know his type. He puts on a dreamboat act when you meet him, but once you get to know him, he has as much charm as a cardboard box.”

  “Oh, pipe down,” Ruthie says.

  I shrug. To me, he’s only a supply teacher, a supply play director who will never see in me the hugely talented actress I know I can be.

  Ruthie says, “Those Clark Gable eyes. They really grab me.”

  Overhearing, another girl says, “More like Gregory Peck. It’s that jaw.”

  “Come on, Rachel,” Ruthie says. “Admit he reminds you of a movie star.”

  “He reminds me of a great big question mark.”

  “Huh?”

  “Besides a cute face, what’s he got?”

  “Sex appeal,” Ruthie says, and everyone hoots with laughter as we file into our next class.

  “Girls, girls!” Miss Fiddler says. “Control the noise.”

  A week later in English, daydreaming, I catch myself gazing at Mr. Tompkins. He has very fine hands. You might even say artistic hands. And his shoulders are … I sit up straight and turn to act 4. Let the other girls go all soft and swoony. I have better things on my mind—my romantic play about war for one, which, for all the trouble I’m taking with it, refuses to fall into place.

  Each day after school, Mr. Tompkins—or Tommy, as everyone soon nicknames him—is surrounded by a gaggle of girls with questions about homework and tests. Not me, though. I observe from the doorway. A good-looking man like this is bound to be conceited, and I can’t stand that in a person, especially in an adult, young as he may be. I do have a question, though, which I long to ask. By the end of the week, the queue for a private audience is considerably shorter, consisting primarily of Hazel Carrington, Ruthie Pritchard, and one or two other girls smitten with love. I join them.

  I get right to the point. No woman-of-the-world smile, no eyelash-batting. “Are we still doing the school play?”

  “Yes,” he says, giving me the full benefit of his even white teeth and dark serious eyes. “We’ll resume rehearsals at the end of next week, once I’ve had a chance to study it.”

  After school the next Friday, play practice, once again, is in full swing. To give him credit, Mr. Tompkins manages pretty well for someone coming to it cold. Sometimes, though, he seems lost in thought, especially when he watches Hazel Carrington, the lead, going through her paces.

  Hazel must notice because she has to be prompted many more times than usual. This irks me. If I were lucky enough to be in the play, I’d have my lines memorized, as well as everyone else’s,
by the second rehearsal.

  I give Hazel her line. “Try paying attention,” I add, sounding a bit surly.

  Mr. Tompkins turns to me with his Clark Gable eyes and says, “You’re a hard-hearted woman.”

  “Huh?” I say, like the stunned bunny I am. No one has ever called me a woman. No one has ever said I was hard-hearted. “Sorry.” Maybe I should have said it to Hazel.

  “No, you’re good. You should have been the director.”

  I’m all red and flustered. Hazel is madly searching for her line, but I haven’t been paying attention, so someone else calls it out. Finally, the world starts up again.

  Ruthie and I walk home together after rehearsal. This April weather is iffy—sun one minute, rain the next, turning my hair into something like a pot scrubber. The overhead clouds look threatening, but we poke along anyway, gabbing about the play practice.

  “Hazel may be beautiful,” I say, “but she can’t act worth beans.”

  “If you’re beautiful, you don’t need to be able to act. She has class, she has high cheekbones, and she’s blonde. That’s all you need these days, besides great teeth. She’s also tall and willowy.” Ruthie goes to a lot of movies, so she knows what she’s talking about.

  “As far as acting goes,” I say, “her finest attribute seems to be the strength of her voice. It probably carries from the auditorium stage all the way to the second storey of the school.”

  “Ahem! Are you jealous?”

  “No. It’s just that, with Mr. Mackiewitz in charge, the play was all about decibels, not emotion, not style. I’m just hoping Mr. Tompkins will be a bit more lavish in the passion department.”

  “He will be. You can tell just by looking at him, his second name is passion.”

  “If I were directing the play, I’d give the audience some grand sentiment to take home. I would have them gasp or shed tears or cower in their seats.”

  “Wouldn’t that be more or less the playwright’s job?”

  “Initially, yes. But then the director has to go to work and wring every drop of emotion out of each word, comma, and period.”