The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place Page 16

  He brewed a fresh pot of coffee and sat in his chair and thought about the towers. It was funny how important they had become to him. He would not even have known that they existed if his mother had not called Uncle Alex that Sunday that I preferred not to go tubing on the lake.

  —that Sunday

  About an hour after the bus left, Mrs. Kaplan came into Meadowlark, carrying a plate of cookies and a container of milk. “Come, Margaret,” she said. “Come sit here so that we can have a little chat.” She placed the plate of cookies between us. “Help yourself,” she said.

  I took a cookie, said thank you, and took a bite. She smiled and waited for me to swallow. I took a second bite. She allowed me to chew a little before she said, “Today, Margaret, we hear that you preferred not to go tubing on the lake.” I nodded. “As a result, Margaret, we hear that you kept an entire bus full of girls waiting while you took time to decide that you preferred not to go. Is that not so?”

  “Not quite,” I replied.

  “Can you tell us what you mean by not quite?”

  “Sure,” I said. Mrs. Kaplan waited. “I did not hold up the bus while I made up my mind. I had made up my mind the night before. It was Gloria who held it up.”

  “Now, Margaret, you don’t mean to tell us that Gloria would keep a busload of girls waiting? Gloria knew how eager everyone was to go tubing on the lake. Everyone but you, Margaret.”

  I asked, “Is that milk for me, Mrs. Kaplan?”

  “Yes, it is,” she replied, handing it over.

  It was hot, and I was thirsty, and I could hear myself making glug-glug sounds. I said, “So much better than that powdered stuff you give us in the mess hall.”

  “The powdered milk keeps better,” Mrs. Kaplan said.

  “And is a lot cheaper,” I replied.

  “Margaret!” Mrs. Kaplan said. “Margaret?” she said softer.

  “Yes, Mrs. Kaplan.”

  “You haven’t answered our question.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t hear a question, Mrs. Kaplan. Would you mind repeating it?”

  “You knew that everyone was eager to go tubing.”

  “And?”

  “And you knew that Gloria would have to come to Meadowlark to get you.”

  “And?”

  “So why do you tell us that Gloria—not you—held up the bus?”

  “Because I told Gloria last night that I would not be going tubing on the lake.”

  “Gloria would not have held up the bus if you had told her. She is one of our finest counselors. She has seniority among all of our counselors.”

  “She must have selective hearing loss. It’s a medical condition of seniors.”

  “Gloria is twenty-two years old. She’s not even old enough to be your mother.”

  “Then she must have selective listening.” I paused a minute. “This morning I told three of the Alums”—here I counted on my fingers—“Alicia Silver, Ashley Schwartz, and Blair Patayani, to remind her.”

  “And no one heard you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Do you want me to believe that these girls also have selective hearing loss?”

  “They must. Otherwise, I would have to believe no one told Gloria so that I would be blamed for holding up the bus. That’s harder to believe than that they have selective hearing loss. Isn’t it, Mrs. Kaplan?”

  Mrs. Kaplan immediately dropped the subject of who held up the bus. She sighed mightily before resuming her smile. “Why, Margaret? Why do you reject all of our efforts to befriend you?” she asked as she reached out to cover my hand with hers.

  I allowed her hand to rest on mine, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “Because you are destroying my self-image.”

  Even though the little chat did not end exactly there, that was where it hit bottom. That was when she popped up from the bed. And that is when the cookie crumbled. And that is when she sent me to Ms. Starr for the second time.

  Jake remembered his mother’s shock and dismay after that little chat. She had gone to her office to compose herself and to read over my file again, and then went to find him.

  Earlier in the day, just about the time that Jake’s mother was carrying cookies to Meadowlark, Cook had called Jake and asked him to come to the mess hall to fix her sink. The problem required nothing more than a plunger and took only a few minutes. When he finished, he saw the Sunday New York Times lying on Cook’s cutting board. He asked Cook if she was done with it. She told him to help himself. So he did. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down with the newspaper. Coffee was not offered to the girls, and he helped himself only when they were gone—and not too often at that because he liked real cream in his coffee, and the best the mess hall had to offer was milk, and whether it was powdered or in the bottle, it was skim.

  The mess hall was next door to the infirmary. Just as he sat down, he heard singing. “. . . Scatter her enemies/And make them fall,/Confound their politics . . . ” He looked out, and just above the lower edge of the window he saw a dark head moving toward the infirmary. Surprised that any of the girls were left in camp, he got up to see who it was. He recognized me, the Bartleby girl.

  I was singing as I sauntered slowly toward my next encounter with Nurse Louise. He smiled to himself as he thought, She must have preferred not to go tubing on the lake. Keeping himself out of the window frame and in the shadows, he watched as I made my way to the infirmary. He heard, “. . . Frustrate their knavish tricks,/On Thee our hopes we fix,/God save us all!” He watched until I was out of sight behind the infirmary door. As he sat back down with his coffee and his newspaper, he thought, How strange! No camper has ever sung that before.

  He had hardly glanced at the headlines when his mother came into the mess hall, visibly upset. He saw that she needed to talk.

  Mrs. Kaplan helped herself to a cup of coffee. Before she would allow herself to sit down, she said, “Jake, you will not believe what your Bartleby girl just said to us.”

  “Said to us? Us, Mother? This is Jake, remember. I am your son, your only son. Singular. You are my mother. My only mother. Singular. So who is us, Mother?”

  Jake said he didn’t know what had prompted him to choose that moment to call his mother on saying us for me and we for I. After all, she had been doing it for years. Maybe it was timing: Having his Sunday morning interrupted first by Cook, now by her. Maybe it was just that there was something acid in this session’s hot summer air. Maybe (and most probably), it was hearing “God Save the Queen” that did it.

  Jake’s remark caught his mother halfway between sitting and standing. She was undecided about whether she should get up and leave in a huff or sit down and have it out with her son. Jake made the decision for her. He took her hand. “Calm down, Mother. Just calm down. Let’s talk about this. Tell me what Bartleby said.”

  Mrs. Kaplan sat.

  She took a shallow sip of coffee and said, “When I asked her why she rejected all our efforts to befriend her, she said, ‘Because you are destroying my self-image.’”

  “What did you do?”

  “I sent her to Louise.”

  “Nurse Starr?”

  Mrs. Kaplan set her cup down. She nodded.

  Jake evoked the image of me, that singular dark head poking its way to the infirmary, singing. As the sight came into focus, so did the song I sang. He hummed a little, and then, half to himself, he started to sing the first verse, the one he knew best, “God save our gracious Queen,/Long live our noble Queen. . . .” By the time he got to “Happy and glorious, /Long to reign over us,” he was singing out loud and when he got to the final line, “God save the Queen,” he was con brio.

  Applying her smile like a cosmetic, his mother asked, “What did you just sing?”

  “I was singing ‘God Save the Queen.’ Is my voice so bad that you don’t recognize it? That Kane girl—Bartleby—was singing it just now.” Full-voiced, Jake repeated, “Happy and glorious, /Long to reign over us,/God save the Queen!”


  Mrs. Kaplan was too bothered to try to figure out why she was so bothered by that song. Instead she focused on the singer. “So,” she hissed, “So,” she repeated, “our Miss Kane, Miss Margaret Rose Kane was singing, was she? She was singing while I was agonizing over what she had just said?”

  “Agonizing? I don’t call sending her off to Louise Starr—”

  His mother’s head hurled back as if slung from a slingshot. The smile was GONE. What was happening? Her son had never spoken to her like this before. Never. Who is us, Mother? . . . I don’t call . . . She stood up, stunned. She stayed in place seething, until she gathered breath enough to reply. “Well, Jacob, in the words of your protégée, I want this conversation to be over.”

  And she stormed out of the mess hall.

  Jake watched her leave, shook his head sadly. He reopened the New York Times. He scanned the news—reading only the headlines and first paragraphs—and read the entire Arts section in depth before allowing himself to open the Sunday magazine and start the crossword puzzle. He had not yet taken his pen from his pocket when Ashley Schwartz found him. She smiled benevolently, and in a voice pitched as high as a dog whistle, she asked him if he enjoyed looking at the pictures. Jake gave her a loony smile and nodded.

  Ashley told him that Gloria said that he should come with her. Jake did not get up immediately. He folded the paper and smoothed it down. She said that he’d better come now because one of the girls in Meadowlark had had an accident. In that same highpitched voice she asked, “Remember the girl who wet her bed?” Jake returned a puzzled look. “The bed wetter?” she repeated. “She just threw up all over the floor in Meadowlark.” And with that, she pantomimed retching. “THROW.UP. FLOOR.MEADOWLARK!”

  He folded the paper again, studied it, smoothed it, hesitated. The temptation to set her straight was strong, but something told him that this was not the time. Ashley thought he hesitated because he didn’t want to come or didn’t understand the urgency. She scolded him, saying that it was starting to smell real bad. She waited for him to stand up. She pinched her nose and made a face. “Stinks. Stinky-poo. UNDERSTAND?” Jake nodded, slowly. “Gloria wants it cleaned up. NOW.” She started to walk away, looked back, and saw that Jake still had not moved. Putting her hands on her hips, she asked if he understood NOW. Jake gave her one of his dopey smiles and started shuffling toward her. She turned her back to him and told him not to forget his bucket and mop and to remember which cabin. Meadowlark.

  Jake took his time getting there, and once he did, he again stifled an impulse to Frustate their knavish tricks. Instead he silently went about the business of cleaning up the mess and never let the treasured alums know that he was on to them.

  Now, as he watched the coffee dripping through the filter, he thought about the Meadowlarks, and he thought about me. The ratio had become Margaret Rose, one: Meadowlarks, seven, for he realized that Berkeley had become one of Them. He thought about all the mischief the Meadowlarks had put me through. They owed me, Bartleby.

  He thought about the tactical error his mother had made in assigning the cabins. She too owed Bartleby.

  And he thought about Alex and Morris and the towers. He owed them a backup plan.

  And then, despite the gallons of coffee he had drunk all day, he fell asleep without unplugging the coffeemaker.

  twenty-five

  The following day, Jake was reluctant to leave his cabin. He knew that any news about our plan—good or bad—would come by phone. He quickly changed the lightbulbs in Hummingbird and came back to the cabin and waited for the phone to ring. He picked up the receiver to make sure there was a dial tone, then left to empty the trash cans into the Dumpster. Returned to the cabin, listened for a ring, checked again for a dial tone.

  He was so jumpy that it was difficult for him to efficiently be his inefficient self.

  He hurried through the rest of his chores, almost giddy with anxiety about his inability to conceive of a backup plan. It was Thursday, and he was due to haul the Dumpster down the hill for pickup, and he would have done so had there been some way to take the phone with him. But there was no telephone cord long enough to reach the bottom of the hill, so he risked his mother’s wrath rather than risk missing a phone call. He left the trash in the Dumpster and hoped that it wouldn’t attract rats or rabid raccoons or overflow before he could cart it away.

  —everyone should always have a backup

  Still worried and uneasy, Jake absentmindedly picked up his paintbrushes and began to dab paint on canvas. It was then that the idea came to him. It came to him all at once: What to do. How to do it. And why it would work. He was ready to run out of his cabin and put his plan in action when he remembered Uncle Alex saying that he got things done by not being in a hurry.

  He would wait. Timing was all. He relaxed.

  He tuned his radio to the classical music station, and as he applied paint to his canvas, he refined his plan and thought about the joys of payback time.

  When my call came, he half expected the news to be bad—and it was—but it was bad in an unexpected way. The first time I told him that I was in jail, it didn’t even register.

  I’m in jail.

  Who is this?

  I’m who the operator said I am. I am Margaret Rose Kane.

  Oh, that Margaret Rose Kane.

  He needed time. He desperately needed time if he was not to hurry, and the timing of his backup plan was to work. He checked his watch. There were three business hours left to the afternoon. Peter Vanderwaal was on Central time, so he had an extra hour to make that call. He put his brushes aside, picked up the phone, and asked for directory assistance. He made three calls before phoning Peter. Then he and Peter talked at length because Peter always talked at length. When he hung up, Jake brewed a fresh pot of coffee.

  And then he waited.

  In the predawn darkness—well past lights-out and long before morning mess call—Jake stormed into Meadowlark cabin and snapped on all the overhead lights. He clapped his hands and shouted, “Up! Up! Everybody, up!” The girls were frightened, which is exactly what Jake had expected and of which he took full advantage. “Get dressed. Wear good tracking shoes, hats, and bring enough sunblock to cover yourselves from head to toe.”

  Ashley Schwartz was the first to speak up. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Alicia asked, “You’re not Jake, are you?”

  “No, I’m his evil twin,” Jake answered. “Now do as I tell you while I go get some supplies.”

  “Supplies for what?”

  “For payback time.”

  “I’m going to Mrs. Kaplan,” Ashley announced. “This is unauthorized, and I’m going to tell.”

  “I wouldn’t do that just yet,” Jake said. “I think we ought to have a little talk first.” Defiantly, Ashley started toward the door. Without touching her, but with a stare as potent as a New Zealand Border collie, Jake herded her back to the row of girls, who were all standing now with their arms crossed over their chests, suddenly conscious of the fact that they were in their nightclothes in the presence of a grown man who was not an idiot. Keeping up his herding-master mode, Jake said, “Sit!” One by one, the girls sat. Three on the edge of one bed. Four on the one facing it. Jake stood in the aisle between the two. “Good!” he said after they had arranged themselves a wingspan apart. “Good!” he repeated. “Now we can talk.”

  He spun around and looked at each of the girls, passing by each one once. Then around again. “Let’s begin with you,” he said pointing directly to Berkeley Sims. “Yes,” he said, “let’s start with Metalmouth Berkeley Sims.” There was a tittering wave that spread along one bed—the one on which Berkeley was seated—across the floor, and along the length of the other. Nothing Jake could have said or done would have better convinced them that this Jake knew more, saw more, heard more than they could ever have guessed.

  “Where were you at camp last year, Miss Berkeley Sims?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Butterworth Cheerle
ading, wasn’t it?” Berkeley nodded. “Is that where you learned the bed-wetting trick?” he asked. She nodded again. “I thought so. It’s quite popular among cheerleaders. Let me see if I have this right. It goes like this: Two girls fill paper cups with urine—their own. They put them on the bathroom floor and leave. A third girl picks one up. Only one. The other is flushed down the toilet. Two others fill paper cups with water. One of the girls stands guard outside the door. Another climbs the ladder and stands on the top rung. First she spills the two glasses of water on the mattress to soak it thoroughly. She sprinkles the urine on top of that. The paper cups are thrown in the Dumpster by the kitchen trash. “So it takes . . . let me see”—here he pretended to count on his fingers—“oh, yes, it takes exactly seven to pull it off. If asked, you could say that none of you had peed in Margaret’s bed, and technically, you would be correct.”

  The girls were speechless.

  “Now, do I have it right?” he asked. They said nothing. “Tell me,” he commanded, “is that the way you did it?” Like birds perched on a wire, they sat motionless. “Is that the way you did it?” he demanded. They nodded in unison. “I can probably tell who urinated in the cups and who climbed the ladder, but I won’t. What is important is that I know who stood guard outside the door. That would be Berkeley. She did not participate other than standing guard and being the mastermind.” He spoke directly to Berkeley. “I’ve seen it before, Berkeley. There are minor variations on the procedure, but in general, it is a trick that Butterworth Cheerleading excels at.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, studied the ceiling for a minute, then lowered his head. “Good,” he said, summarizing. “Now that we have that little incident solved, who wants to talk about plumbing?”