A Summer to Die. Lois Lowry

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СКАЧАТЬ accomplished something important – I don’t even know for sure yet what I want it to be, just that it will be something that makes people say my name, Meg Chalmers, with respect. When I told Molly that once, she said that what she wants is to have a different name when she grows up, to be Molly Something Else, to be Mrs Somebody, and to have her children, lots of them, call her “Mother”, with respect, and that’s all she cares about. She’s content, waiting for that; I’m restless, and so impatient. She’s sure, absolutely sure, that what she’s waiting for will happen, just the way she wants it to; and I’m so uncertain, so fearful my dreams will end up forgotten somewhere, someday, like a piece of string and a paper clip lying in a dish.

      Being both determined and unsure at the same time is what makes me the way I am, I think: hasty, impetuous, sometimes angry over nothing, often miserable about everything. Being so well sorted out in her own goals, and so assured of everything happening the way she wants and expects it to, is what makes Molly the way she is: calm, easy-going, self-confident, downright smug.

      Sometimes it seems as if, when our parents created us, it took them two tries, two daughters, to get all the qualities of one whole, well-put-together person. More often, though, when I think about it, I feel as if they got those qualities on their first try, and I represent the leftovers. That’s not a good way to feel about yourself, especially when you know, down in the part of you where the ambition is, where the dreams are, where the logic lies, that it’s not true.

      The hardest part about living in the same room with someone is that it’s hard to keep anything hidden. I don’t mean the unmatched, dirty socks or the fourteen crumpled papers with tries at an unsuccessful poem on them, although those are the things that upset Molly, that made her draw the line. I mean the parts of yourself that are private: the tears you want to shed sometimes for no reason, the thoughts you want to think in a solitary place, the words you want to say aloud to hear how they sound, but only to yourself. It’s important to have a place to close a door on those things, the way I did in town.

      The house in town is still there, and it’s still our house, but there are other people living in it now, which does something terrible to my stomach when I think about it too much. My room had red-and-white-checked wallpaper; there is a place in one corner, by a window, where I played three games of noughts and crosses on the wallpaper with a Magic Marker. Cats’ games, all of them. I played against myself, so it didn’t matter much, but it’s funny how you want to win anyway.

      The university clock in its high brick tower was just across the street from the house; at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I could hear it strike each hour, the chimes coming clear and well defined as silhouettes from the ivied circle of the numbered face in the dark. That’s one of the things I miss most, living out here in the country, out here in the middle of nowhere. I like quiet. And it sure is quiet here. But there are times when I lie awake at night and all I can hear is Molly breathing in the bed next to mine; cars seldom go past on this road, and no clocks strike, nothing measures the moments. There is just this quiet, and it seems lonely.

      The quiet is why we came. The university has given my dad just this year to finish his book. He worked on it for a while in the old house, shut in his study; but even though he was officially on leave from teaching, the students kept stopping by. “I just thought I’d drop in for a minute to see Dr Chalmers,” they’d say, standing on the porch, looking embarrassed. My mother would say, “Dr Chalmers can’t be disturbed,” and then my father’s voice would call from upstairs, “Let them in, Lydia, I want to stop for coffee anyway.”

      So my mother would bring them in, and they would stay for hours, having coffee, talking to Dad, and then he would invite them for dinner, and Mother would add some noodles to the casserole, wash another head of lettuce for the salad, or quickly peel a few more carrots for the stew. We would take hours eating, because everyone talked so much, and my father would open a bottle of wine. Sometimes it would be late at night before they left. I would be in bed by then, listening to the clock chime across the street as they said goodbye on the porch, lingering to ask questions, to exhaust an argument, to laugh at another of my father’s anecdotes. Then I would hear my parents come upstairs to bed, and I would hear my father say, “Lydia, I am never going to finish this book.”

      The title of the book is The Dialectic Synthesis of Irony. When Dad announced that, very proud of it, at dinner one night, Mum asked, “Can you say that three times fast?” Molly and I tried, and couldn’t, and it creased us up. Dad looked very stern, and said, “It is going to be a very important book”; Molly said, “What is?” and he tried to say the title again, couldn’t, and it creased him up, too.

      He tried to explain to me once what the title means, but he gave up. Molly said she understood it very well. But Molly is full of bull sometimes.

      It was at breakfast the Saturday morning before Thanksgiving that Mum and Dad told us we were leaving the house in town. I had figured that something was going on, because my mother had been on the phone all week, and my mother is not the type of woman who talks on the phone very much.

      “We’ve found a house,” Mum said, pouring more coffee for herself and Dad, “out in the country so that your father can have some peace and quiet. It’s a lovely house, girls, built in 1840, with a big fireplace in the kitchen. It’s on a dirt road, and surrounded by one hundred and sixty acres of woods and fields. When summer comes we’ll be able to put in a vegetable garden—”

      Summer. I guess Molly and I had been thinking the same thing, that she was talking about a month or so, maybe till after the Christmas holiday. But summer. It was only November. We sat there like idiots, with our mouths open. I had been born while we lived in the house in town, thirteen years before, and now they were talking about leaving it behind. I couldn’t think of anything to say, which is not unusual for me. But Molly always thinks of things to say.

      “What about school?” she asked.

      “You’ll go by bus, to the Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School. It’s a good school, and it’s only about a twenty-minute bus ride.”

      “Can you say that three times fast?” asked Dad, grinning. “Macwahoc Valley Consolidated School?” We didn’t even try.

      Consolidated school. I didn’t even know what that meant. To be honest, it sounded to me as if the school needed a laxative. Anyway, school wasn’t my main concern. I was thinking about my Thursday afternoon art class, which was just about to get into oils after umpteen weeks on watercolours, and my Saturday morning photography class, where my photograph of the clock tower at sunset had just been selected Best of the Week, beating the eight others in the class, which were all taken by boys.

      But I didn’t even ask about my classes, about what would happen to them when we moved to the country. Because I knew.

      “Dad,” groaned Molly. “I’ve just been made cheerleader.”

      Boy, was that the wrong thing to say to my father. He’s proud of Molly, because she’s pretty and all that, even though he always seems somewhat surprised by her, that all of a sudden since she turned fifteen, she has boyfriends and stuff. Every now and then he looks at her and shakes his head in a kind of astonishment, and pride. But he has this thing about priorities, and when Molly said that, he set down his coffee cup very hard and looked at her with a frown.

      “Cheerleading,” he said, “does not have top priority.”

      And that was that. It was all decided, and there wasn’t anything to argue or fuss about. It was too busy a time, anyway. We almost skipped Thanksgiving, except that there were students who couldn’t go home for the holiday, and so five of them spent that Thursday with us, and Mum cooked a turkey. But most of the day we packed. The СКАЧАТЬ