Getting Along
Joanna and Amy registered at Duncan High School on the following Wednesday, though Tuesday had been the official registration day. That first morning, they had meant to go over to Duncan, but as the hours passed, somehow they just didn’t go, they just couldn’t make themselves show up. There had been so much to do in the apartment, they persuaded themselves, to make it feel like their own true home.
“Ambivalence, thy name is Jo-Jo and Amy,” Meg reproved them when she returned from class on the Tuesday afternoon of what she had thought would be their first day of school, only to find the two of them in the tank tops and shorts they had slept in, bickering over closet space in their shared room and about where towels should be stored and who should be the one to run out to buy toilet paper, as there was none in the apartment. “Some of us managed to take up our packs and get going hours ago,” she added, nearly tripping over the dark lumps that were her sisters’ backpacks, left carelessly in the hallway. “What have you been doing all day? Do I have to take you both over there myself?”
“We just weren’t ready,” Joanna admitted, emerging from the closet with an armload of shirts. “We haven’t rehearsed enough.
Amy and I weren’t quite ready to face the hordes of New Haven. The hoi polloi.”
“Is hoi polloi the rich fancy people or the common people? I can never remember which it is,” Amy said.
“Common people, actually,” Meg replied, flipping through the junk mail she had found stuffed in their mailbox. Pizza delivery and Chinese take-out flyers, coupons for a discount on one-hour eyeglasses at the dreary downtown mall. “Here,” she said, thrusting the pile of flyers toward Amy. “This mess is all aimed at the hoi polloi. Oh, gross, special Hawaiian Pizza is only $4.99 with any other pizza. Tomato sauce, mozzarella, ham, and pineapple chunks. The hoi polloi special. Free delivery in our area.”
“Eew,” Amy agreed. “I guess I was thinking of hoity-toity. So it’s one of those risky phrases, then,” she continued, “because half the people you say it to think it means the opposite of the other half of the people you say it to.”
“To whom you say it,” muttered Joanna automatically. She had been folding shirts and sweaters and putting them away on the closet shelf and had just now completed the task.
“Janet talk!” Amy exclaimed in dismay.
“Sorry. Sorry. Bad habit.”
“Isn’t that my blue shirt I couldn’t find a week ago?” Amy said, perusing the closet contents. “You thief, Jo-Jo. And you liar. You said you didn’t have it.”
“I forgot I had it, sort of,” Joanna said guiltily. “Sorry. Take something of mine.”
“I don’t want your skanky clothes,” Amy muttered.
“Fine, then forget about the green jacket you said you wanted to borrow,” Joanna retorted.
“Stop it,” Meg said. “Stop being babies. And you guys, we’re completely out of toilet paper? Nobody on High Street ever has to buy toilet paper, we just take it from the women’s bathroom in the basement of the British Art Center. Come on, empty that backpack and I’ll show you where.”
It was, after all that, shockingly easy to finesse their registration. Their Warren Prep transcripts had been sent, as per Joanna and Amy’s somewhat imperious hand-delivered letters of request the previous week. Janet and Lou hadn’t exactly agreed to this, but then Janet and Lou hadn’t exactly disagreed with any of it either. Joanna felt bad about the tuition money already paid to Warren, a famously innovative school with a highly competitive admissions policy, and wondered if their parents would get any of it back at such a late date.
“Not our problem,” Amy had said with a dismissive wave, but her eyes had grown round and her mouth had formed a silent little o when Joanna told her how much money their parents paid annually for her tuition at Warren Prep.
It was unlikely that the harassed woman behind the desk in the front office, or anyone else at Duncan, an overcrowded and decaying inner-city high school with an ongoing asbestos problem and three shooting incidents the previous spring, had scrutinized the transcripts with any care or interest on that Wednesday. In an hour, they were registered students at Duncan High.
Joanna and Amy, whose school lives had always, up until now, been the object of intense interest and involvement on the part of their parents and their teachers, had been needlessly concerned that they would have trouble without a parent to sign them up. The guidance counselor was in a hurry, there were lots of stragglers, and there were very few parents in view. It was all pretty disorganized. Nobody asked the questions the Green sisters had anticipated. They never got to use their rehearsed explanations about their mom’s new job at Yale and the divorce and their move. Nobody even asked them why they were a day late.
Their claim of residency in New Haven was never questioned. Apparently, the photocopy of Meg’s receipt for telephone service had been sufficient proof that some sort of Green family did in fact
make its home at their High Street address. Perhaps Margaret Green was presumed to be their mother. Perhaps Margaret Green was presumed to be their crack-addicted great-aunt once removed who had custody of them because everyone else was in jail or rehab. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
“Duncan is just right for my mood,” Amy said with angry conviction after school that first day. She and her sisters were at the table, picking at the refrigerated remains of their take-out Chinese dinner from the night before. Teddy was out, at a dinner meeting with some study group. “So first I walk through this totally sketchy neighborhood, then there are metal detectors at the doors, my classes are in these really horrible classrooms, there are kids saying things like ‘Fuck your mother’ in the hallways, some girl gang set a fire in a bathroom during fourth period, a weird girl was vomiting in the locker room—”
“Well, that was familiar, anyway,” said Joanna.
“I’m not finished.” Amy glared at her. “Don’t interrupt me. You’re always interrupting me. So when I left, when I was waiting for you out front, there was this skeevy guy standing right by the entrance saying ‘smoke, smoke, smoke’ with the stupid guard like two feet away acting totally blind and deaf. By the time you came out he was gone.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t see the smoke guy, but otherwise, for what it’s worth, that’s pretty much my experience today, too,” Joanna said. “Though when you think of it, there really always were girls vomiting between classes at Warren, too. That’s all I was saying. That rich kids in New York probably vomit more than anyone else. But they do it more discreetly.”
“God,” said Meg. She was shocked (though not about the vomiting, as she herself had flirted with bulimia the spring of her senior year at Warren, though she didn’t think Amy or Joanna knew anything much about that). Well, what had she thought it would be like? In her two years in New Haven, had she ever seen Duncan High? She had tutored a Duncan student last year as part of a
Dwight Hall program, but Marta, a shy Puerto Rican with very poor English who was now presumably attending the local community college she had aspired to, had met her on the Yale campus each time. It had never occurred to Meg to quiz her about the conditions at Duncan.
How could Meg have been so reckless as to suggest that her sisters could get an education in such a place? How would they ever get to college from here? Shouldn’t Joanna be registered for SATs? Did Duncan even have a college guidance counselor? It must. But the local paper always had some headline about school budget cuts. Meg had never read the local paper. She read The New York Times and voted in New York. She suddenly realized that, like most everyone else she knew at Yale who wasn’t a townie, she had treated New Haven simply as that space which one passes through to get from Yale to New York. She had no idea at all what Duncan was really like.
A cold wash of fear swept through Meg. For a moment, she doubted that they could do this at all—that she could do what was being asked of her. The burden of mothering her two sisters seemed suddenly overwhelmingly heavy. If life was as hard as this, she didn’t see how they were to get through it.
“Are you guys totally sure you want to go there? It isn’t too late to change your minds—Warren doesn’t even start until after next week. I mean, you could try living at home and just not ever speaking to them, and you could come up here every weekend—”
Joanna was totally stunned, unable to make a sound at that instant. She felt as if she had been shot, Meg’s easy betrayal was so sudden and devastating. She glanced at Amy, who had stood up from the table so abruptly that the flimsy bentwood chair tipped over behind her and clattered loudly on the bare floor.
“How could you say that? How could you even think it? Don’t ever say that again!” shrieked Amy in a terrible, anguished voice. “Don’t ever say it. Stop now. How could you even think it for one
second? Take it back! Take it back! Oh, Meg, I thought we could trust you!”
“Amy—” Joanna wanted to remain calm, be the voice of reason, though in a funny way she was grateful to Amy for giving voice to the hysteria she felt. Meg looked miserable. Somebody was thumping up the stairs in the hallway, maybe Teddy. “Amy,” Joanna began again, “please don’t blame Meg.”
Teddy’s key rattled in the lock.
“Hello?”
He stood in the doorway, breathless from his sprint up the stairs. He liked to take the stairs two at a time. “Hey,” he said. The air was thick with tension. He had an armload of apples snugged against his chest. “This guy brought a bushel of apples to the meeting.” Teddy looked around the room questioningly and then, tilting forward from the waist, bowed in a gentlemanly gesture to drop the apples carefully onto the table. “They’re from his uncle’s or something, some kind of farm in Wallingford. Fucking Yale Co-op bag ripped on the street. No wonder they’re probably going out of business with such crappy paper bags.” He bent down to help Amy right her chair.
“Don’t.” Amy pushed his arm away rudely, as if he were an intrusive dog. Teddy backed up with raised eyebrows. The apples rolled and bumped against the Chinese food cartons.
“I think I’ll just be in my room for a little while, now,” Teddy said with exaggerated courtesy. “I’ll just leave you little women to your delightfully atmospheric family get-together here. Carry on sharing and caring. Sorry to intrude.”
“Yes, thanks. Great. Sorry, Teddy,” Meg said over her shoulder to his retreating form.
“No problem.” He stopped in the hallway. No one said anything. They knew he was still standing there. The three sisters looked at one another, waiting. After another moment, they heard his voice from the hallway.
“I guess this wasn’t the moment to comfort you with apples.”
“What’s that from?” Joanna wondered. Janet would know. Fuck.
“Song of Solomon,” Teddy said, reappearing momentarily in the doorway.
“Thanks, T, sorry we’re so grumpy,” Meg apologized again. “You’re a pal.”
“De rien, mesdemoiselles, pas de quoi, je vous en prie,” he exclaimed in one of his several ridiculous accents, with a shrug. “Je suis désolé de vous déranger,” and he withdrew once more. His door closed a moment later and then they could hear the familiar sounds of Billie Holiday moaning softly about strange fruit hanging from the trees.
Joanna gave Amy a little shove on the arm and muttered, “You’ve a great want of manners, haven’t you?” an ill-timed invocation of another of their mother’s favorite lines. She knew the apples were for her especially, as she had an insatiable apple habit.
Meg wore an injured look. Amy glared at them both, first one and then the other, and then she shook her head and beat her fists on her thighs in frustration.
“Oh, Jo-Jo, don’t you understand either? Doesn’t anybody get it? It’s just that I am so frustrated that I say something and I think I’m being clear and then everybody thinks it means the opposite. It’s like the fucking hoi polloi thing. I’ll apologize to Teddy in a little bit. Don’t you understand what I was saying? I think Duncan is perfect for us,” Amy said. “The disgustingness suits me just fine. And, Meg, please don’t you go quoting Janet. Both of you do it all the time. All her little expressions. I just can’t take it right now. Okay? All I’m saying is I think Duncan is perfect. I’ll be fine. Joanna will be fine, won’t you be all right with your classes, Jo-Jo? You’re in honors French, right? With the smart kids? Tell Meg it’s okay. And they said they would put you in honors English next term, right? And meanwhile you’re probably the smartest kid in the class, so you’ll get really good grades, which will be good for college applications, right? Make Meg see why this is exactly right for us!”
“Meg?” Joanna looked at her older sister questioningly.
“I’m just worried,” Meg said. “There is just so much—”
“Don’t be. We’ll manage. We’ll be okay with the school thing, really, but we can only do this if we stick together,” Joanna said. “We know you’re making a lot of sacrifices for us right now. We’ll make it up to you someday, won’t we, Amy? But if you bail on us now, without even giving it a chance—”
“I can’t go back,” Amy broke in fiercely. “I just can’t. I won’t. I can’t. I just can’t be with them right now. I want to stay here with you, Meg. I need to stay with you. So does Jo-Jo. We have to stay with you. We don’t have anywhere else to go. I know you’re not our mother, but you’re all we’ve got right now. Don’t you want us to stay with you?” Tears were running down Amy’s face, and now Meg just couldn’t stand it. She would shoulder this burden. She simply had to do this.
“So which is it, then?” Meg asked teasingly, taking Amy’s hand and swinging it as if she were cajoling a toddler. She put her arms around Amy and hugged her. She uttered her question in a sly tone, invoking one of their mother’s more despised philosophical inquiries—“A want or a need?”
“Oh, fuck you,” Amy said, grinning now through her tears. “Fuck you very much indeed.” She wiped her teary face with the heel of one hand.
“We’ll manage, Meg, I know we will. We like adventures,” Joanna declared, hoping desperately that what she said was true. “And we’re going to find some.”
Reader’s note: When is something going to happen? This chapter is all very atmospheric, but if this is a novel shouldn’t there be more plot by now? AG
Author’s note: Most readers appreciate the value of becoming intimately acquainted with the characters in a work of fiction.
Reader’s note: Something has happened in this chapter—my sister has told the world about my bulimia. Thanks a lot. MG
Author’s note: Do you want me to change it?
Reader’s note: No, I want you to leave it in so your readers will know what sort of morality the author of this so-called novel really has, so they’ll know who they’re dealing with. MG
Author’s note: With whom they’re dealing.
Reader’s note: There you go. MG
Reader’s note: Whatever. I don’t think it’s so bad if the character has a history of bulimia, I mean, who doesn’t? But I do think it’s a perfect example of what’s going on here. First there is a violation of a confidence and then the authoress justifies it with an intellectual theory, so any objecting to what she has done makes you and me look petty and unintellectual. Meanwhile, I don’t see any major embarrassing revelations so far about the Joanna character. The middle sister is obviously the most mature and flawless member of the family. I can’t wait for the reviewers to catch on to the whole self-serving and immoral strategy. AG
Reader’s note: I doubt that reviewers can be counted on to right the wrongs perpetrated in these pages. MG
Author’s note: Wilde said there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Reader’s note: I didn’t suggest that the novel was immoral. I was referring to the author. AG
Author’s note: In any case, the very existence of these notes in the published book is the remedy we all agreed to. You are both guilty of violating the spirit, if not the literal language, of the agreement, by persisting in making remarks that fall well outside the range of the intended function of these notes. The real repetitions and consequent failure to develop momentum in these pages lie not in the text of my novel but in your repeated accusations and my repeated explanations.
Reader’s note: We can say what we want, when we want to, in these notes. The agreement guarantees that. MG
Author’s note: Regrettably true.