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  Constance C. Greene

  To my Maine friends,

  each and every one of them

  1

  Schuyler Sweet is anything but. Ask anybody. I ought to know. I am Schuyler Sweet. I’m halfway to twelve, a bad age in a woman. Or in anybody else, for that matter. Sometimes I don’t have the sweetest disposition in the world. My mother was like me when she was my age. She told me so herself. But now she’s got herself sorted out and she’s as sweet as pie. When it behooves her. Right now it’s behooving her because she’s in love again. She said after the divorce she would never fall in love again as it makes a woman too vulnerable. My father said he had never noticed she had a vulnerable bone in her body. But that was, as I said, right after my mother and father got divorced and they were not themselves. People always say that as if being yourself were a good thing. In my opinion, it depends. Some yourselfs I could mention are very turdy and disagreeable people. In their case, it would be better if they were someone else. In many cases, if you’re not yourself, it’s an improvement. If you get my meaning.

  Take me. Sometimes when I’m myself, I can be very nasty. When I’m not myself, some might think I was a darling girl. I’m not myself very seldom, so my reputation, generally speaking, is not so hot. I don’t know why. I like people. Most people. Well, a lot of people. Some people. I don’t like people who are slobs, though, or people who are greedy or stuck-up or conceited. Or stingy. Or phony. I guess I hate phonies more than anybody.

  As I said, I can be mean. It just pops out, the meanness. Every time I tell myself I’ve been mean for the last time, something happens and—presto—I find myself being mean all over again. Once I stuck a rusty needle under my fingernail so I would be reminded not to be mean if I felt a fit of meanness coming on. All that happened was that I got an infection and had to have a tetanus shot, which is no picnic.

  I was trying to mortify my flesh, as the saints did in days of yore. No wonder so many saints keeled over in droves back then. They didn’t have tetanus shots or any of the advantages of modern medicine in case they too stuck rusty needles under their skin. I think it must be easier to be a saint these days than it was in olden times. However, saints seem to have lost status and no longer occupy a place of honor in our society. A sad state of affairs.

  My feet are growing while the rest of me stands still, canceling my immediate plans to be a ballet dancer. Perhaps the rest of me will catch up with my feet in due course, but at the moment it seems unlikely. My best friend, Rowena Hastings, says I remind her of a bull in a china shop. There are plenty of things she reminds me of, but I refrain from mentioning them because at the moment I’m on a kindly kick. It’s very odd. Every time I go on a kindly kick someone says something cruel to me and it’s a struggle to stay kindly. Rowena, I might add, is developing into the type that has boys writing notes and stuffing them down the back of her sweater or shirt when she’s not looking. The notes say clever things like “U R 4 ME” or “Meet you at the Laundromat. Bring suds.” It’s not what they say, it’s the way they say it, I always say.

  My mother is a photographer. She specializes in pictures of wild animals. Next week she’s going to Africa to shoot a layout of a famous game reserve for a magazine. The four of us—my father, my brothers, and I—will keep house. My father is an artist, a cartoonist, really. He does the comic strip “Plotsie,” which is about a kid who can’t do anything right. Plotsie’s been quite a success, so a lot of people must relate to him. My father works at home, one reason he and my mother got a divorce. They suffered from too much togetherness. That’s what they said. They had fifteen years of togetherness, and it finally got to them. I can understand that. Most fathers go off to work in the morning and arrive home in time for supper, full of jolly little tales and bits of funny dialogue they’ve picked up along the way, which they can relate to their wives and children to liven up their day. Not my father. He sits around scratching his head and grousing about how he can’t get a good line for Plotsie’s next adventure. Cartoonists, by and large, are somewhat eccentric.

  We live in Maine in a village that calls itself the prettiest village in the entire state. It even has a sign posted to that effect on the outskirts of town so tourists will see it and write lots of postcards back home to prove they’ve been to the prettiest village in Maine. Who decides which is the prettiest village, anyway? Do they take a vote? Or does the mayor or some politician say, “This is the prettiest village in the state”? My father says it’s the Chamber of Commerce. He’s probably right.

  I don’t think anyone can decide what’s the prettiest or best or worst of anything. All the citizens should have a vote to see what’s the prettiest, ugliest, smelliest. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, too much importance is put on looks. It’s a known fact, however, that pretty gets you further in life than ugly. Ask anybody. Good-looking people have it all over the uglies of this world. They get to play the lead in the school play, sing solos in the glee club even if their voices are mediocre. And they also get to be on the school traffic squad, which means they boss everybody and act like little Hitlers just because they wear arm bands. They shout, “Slow down or I’ll report you!” as if they were actual arms of the law. I’ve noticed when perfectly ordinary people get on the traffic squad, they change overnight. Sort of like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you get my meaning.

  If you think from reading the above that I’m not one of the world’s good lookers, you’re right. My face wouldn’t stop a clock. Neither would it launch a thousand ships. I look like my mother. The boys look like my father, who is handsome in an offbeat way. He has a Yankee face, long and lean and rugged. My mother is small, but her posture is excellent so people think she’s a lot taller. She’s nice looking in a folksy, midwestern way. People are always surprised to learn she’s quite famous in her field. She’s even been on television. Everybody in town tuned in. Rowena said, “Your mother seemed very nervous.” That’s all she said. Not, “Your mother certainly was good,” or, “I thought your mother spoke very clearly.” Just, “Your mother seemed very nervous.”

  Rowena’s mother is a housewife. She told someone she didn’t think it was right for Mary Sweet to be running around the world taking pictures of rhinos and hippos when she should be home checking her husband and children for boils. That’s what she said: boils. The Hastings kids have piles of boils. Which is better than piles of piles any day in the week. Piles are gross things that attack your rear end. Their proper name is “hemorrhoids,” which should give you some idea. My father had them once. After that he rigged up a contraption he could lean against while he worked instead of sitting down eight hours a day at his drawing board. He told me people who got piles usually sat down for a large part of the day.

  I don’t know how I got into this. I certainly didn’t intend to discuss hemorrhoids.

  One more thing. Some say that boils are due to a vitamin deficiency in the diet. Have I ever hinted at this to Rowena? Never.

  2

  My brother Stanley is seven and my brother Sidney is five. We call Stanley Tad, short for tadpole, which is a baby frog. My father said that’s what Tad looked like when he was born—a baby frog. Sidney is called Sidney because it suits him. Sidney is small for his age but, as I say, he’s only five. He’s got lots of time. I’m named for my father, who is also Schuyler Sweet. What happened was this:

  I was the first kid in the family. When I was born, my father took a long, hard look at me and said, “That’s it, Mary. No more.” First-time parents have difficulty adjust
ing to the fact that new babies are frequently repulsive. My father told me that, so I know it’s so. My mother, however, said I was darling. “No matter what your father says, you were a darling baby,” she told me. My grandfather came all the way from Indiana to check out me, his first grandchild. He leaned over the crib, stared down at me for a minute, then said, “Feed it and water it and it’ll turn out fine.” Then he handed over a check for fifty dollars to take care of my college education, and went back to Indiana to tend his cows.

  But, human beings what they are, after a respite Tad came along life’s highway. Then, in two more years, Sidney showed up. Sidney was the pick of the litter, with big blue eyes and enough hair for three babies. I don’t know why they gave us all names beginning with S. People sometimes have a hard time keeping our names straight. Sometimes the boys and I sit around saying all our names as fast as we can. We sound like a bunch of snakes at a slumber party, all those sssssssssss sounds. Only my mother, whose name is Mary, as I think I mentioned, lacks an S. And soon, if she marries this man she thinks she loves, she won’t even be Sweet any more. I think she’ll be sorry, but she says he’s the man for her. She said this in front of my father in a loud voice. He only scratched his head and thought about Plotsie.

  We live in a Maine-type farmhouse. It’s one room deep but stretches out along the top of Blueberry Hill, which is the hill we live on. My mother sleeps in one end in her studio, my father sleeps in the other in his studio, and me and the boys sleep in the middle. It works all right. For the time being.

  Tad lost his first tooth last week, and he put it under his pillow so the tooth fairy would come get it and leave him a quarter. He wrapped it up good and tight inside a grubby piece of paper, folding it this way and that so the tooth would fit tight and not get lost. He counted on that quarter. He had about a hundred plans for that quarter. He was proud of losing his first tooth too, because that meant he was on his way to old age. In the middle of the night Sidney got out of bed and stole Tad’s tooth and flushed it down the toilet. We only found out about it next morning when Tad let out a roar of rage when he looked under his pillow and saw there was nothing there. Sidney never lies. He doesn’t know how. So when Tad went tearing around the house shouting, “Somebody stole my tooth! Who stole my tooth? Who stole it?” Sidney piped up and said, “I did.”

  That took courage. If you could’ve seen Tad’s face, you’d know what I mean. Tad’s big and strong for his age. But Sidney just stood his ground with his feet planted wide and a fierce look on his white face. His face was so white I thought he was going to keel over. He was scared but he stayed put, and Tad came at him with his fists clenched, ready to punch the stuffing out of him. My father held on to Tad so he couldn’t do Sidney any damage.

  “Why’d you do that?” Tad shouted over and over. “Why’d you steal my tooth? You’re jealous, that’s why. You’re too little to lose a tooth. You’re jealous!” All the while he was flailing his arms, trying to get loose from my father’s grip so he could pound Sidney’s head into the rug.

  At last, tears streaming down his face, Sidney said, “I didn’t want that old tooth fairy coming into my room. I didn’t want any old tooth fairy sneaking in while I was asleep and reaching under the pillow. I’m scared of the tooth fairy. I didn’t want him coming in while I wasn’t looking.” Sidney always calls the tooth fairy Him. I don’t know why.

  Everybody knows it’s a Her.

  Poor little Sidney. He doesn’t like to know about fairies or leprechauns. He imagines little men moving stealthily around the house, darting from tree to tree like Indians on the warpath, ready to shoot their arrows through the windows and maybe through his head. He looks in the closet, too, before he goes to bed, to make sure there’s no one there. He also checks under his bed. And, if you want to be really mean, hide in the dark at the top of the stairs and pounce out at him. That scares him silly.

  Dad says he’ll grow out of it. In the meantime he’s a gentle little boy. I wish he’d get tougher, for his sake. But if he did, he wouldn’t be Sidney.

  Dad gave Tad a quarter to make up for the stolen tooth. But Tad said it wasn’t the same thing, although I notice he didn’t give the quarter back. But I know what he means. The night after it happened, I read a story to Sidney before his bedtime. Tad’s nose was still out of joint. He said he didn’t want to hear any old story so it was just me and Sidney. Halfway through the story, Sidney put his thumb in his mouth and made little sucking noises. He hadn’t sucked his thumb in weeks.

  “I can’t help it,” he told me. “I’m sorry I did what I did. But tonight I need my thumb. It comforts me.”

  I’m glad my mother and father didn’t give up after they had me.

  3

  Rowena Hastings says I’ve been getting very prickly of late. She says I never used to be prickly but now I am. I don’t think she’s right. If she doesn’t quit saying things like that, Rowena and I may no longer be best friends. Rowena has beautiful long brown hair, which she rinses in vinegar to bring out its red highlights. She uses about a quart of vinegar a month. Whenever the strong scent of vinegar is in the air, you may be sure Rowena is in the neighborhood.

  I have a second-best friend whose name is Betty Binns. Betty’s mother sells cosmetics from door to door. She’s a large woman with a wide, smooth face and dark hair, which she scrapes back and ties with a rubber band or a bit of yarn. Some have been known to pull their shades and hide in the closet when Betty’s mother approaches, as she’s famous for not taking no for an answer. Betty takes after her mother, in both looks and temperament. Betty’s father is a TV repairman. Their garage is chock-full of broken-down TV sets. Betty’s father has the reputation of being slow but sure. Boys don’t stuff notes down Betty’s shirt any more than they do mine. Betty is very intelligent. She reads best-sellers. Only best-sellers. Then she tells you the plot. Betty can get quite boring when she tells the plots of all the books she reads, but so far I haven’t told her she’s boring. I think that would be mean. Even for me.

  Have you ever heard anyone say, “When you come right down to it, I’m a pretty boring person”? I bet you haven’t. Nobody thinks of themselves as a boring person. Ask anybody. Say, “Do you think you’re a boring person?” and they’ll probably look very surprised and say, “Well, now that you mention it, no, not really.” Most people think they’re fairly interesting. Not outrageously interesting, just moderately so. Very few people actually say to themselves, Boy, am I ever a bore! It goes against the grain, so to speak.

  I’m a fairly interesting person. Not always but sometimes. I try to ask intelligent questions and be interested in other people. Like I always find out how many brothers and sisters kids have and what their favorite food is and what television programs they watch. Where their mothers and fathers were born and all. I took a magazine quiz last week to find out how interesting I really am. I scored between seventy-five and eighty, which means I’m fairly interesting. I’d like to raise my score so that I’m classified as a Very Interesting Person rather than just a Fairly. Which is why I’m making an effort to listen intently and ask good questions instead of talking about myself all the time. I won’t mention the names of some people who are guilty of talking about themselves. Their initials, however, are R. H. and, sometimes, B. B.

  I think it’s good to be curious. I don’t mean nosy, I mean curious. I like to know about people: where they come from, what they do for a living, what they think about. How old they are. Once a friend of my mother’s came over and we were chatting and she said to me, “How old are you?” So I told her. Then I said, “How old are you?” back to her. She froze. I mean, I could feel her freezing right in front of me. Her face got very cold, and she left soon afterward without telling me how old she was. When I told my mother, she fell on the floor, laughing.

  “Even her own mother doesn’t know how old she is!” my mother howled, tears streaming down her face, she was laughing so hard.

  Betty Binns just founded the Chum Club
. She sent out notices saying membership dues were ten cents a month. Each member, Betty said, had to have a yard sale in her yard. All members of the Chum Club would contribute items to be sold. Proceeds would go to various charitable institutions. Betty sat by her telephone, picking her cuticle, waiting for her phone to ring. She received a blow to her solar plexus, never mind her pride, when no one called. Not a single person. So then she got on the horn and asked everyone in her famous huffy voice why they were sitting on their hands and not calling her.

  “I thought perhaps you were out of town,” she said. If any of us goes as far as Bangor once a year, it’s a big deal. “Maybe your father forgot to pay his phone bill,” was another thing she said, earning her no friends and a few enemies. No one wanted to join her Chum Club, it seemed.

  “Such a dumb name for a club,” Rowena hissed. “I never heard of such a dumb name for a club.” Still, if Rowena hadn’t received an invitation, rest assured the fur would’ve flown. We said if we were expected to contribute items to the yard sale, and go to the trouble of lettering signs and tacking them up on the school bulletin board and putting them in the window of the general store and outside the post office and all, and hanging signs on trees giving directions on how to get there, we wanted the proceeds for ourselves.

  Some hard feelings resulted. Betty said she felt sorry for people who were so grasping. But, after a little thought, like about three minutes, she called us up and said O.K., scratch the charitable contributions. Three people signed up for Betty’s Chum Club. Me and her and Rowena. Then things came to a grinding halt. Our membership roster fell on its face. I suggested Sidney and Tad as back-up members. After making considerable derogatory remarks as to the suitability of accepting boys, Betty and Rowena finally agreed. But when I mentioned the Chum Club to the boys, they made vomit noises and ran and hid. So for the time being it’ll be just the three of us. If you ask me, three members aren’t enough for a club. But that’s where it stands now. Our first yard sale is scheduled to be the last weekend in April. If it’s not snowing. In Maine you never know. Our snow date is the first weekend in May, to be on the safe side. We want to beat the mayflies. They arrive later on in May. No one is safe from them. They have a ferocious bite that lasts for days and raises huge welts.