Willow Run (2 page)

My heart was pounding. Grandpa had to stay here. Had to. And then I thought about his being here alone. Mom must have been thinking the same thing. She took a quick breath. And at the same time Grandpa said, “Ah, Edward.”
Edvard.

I swallowed. Eddie was his favorite.

“You're right, all of you. I will stay here,” Grandpa said.

I looked out the window. I had a sudden memory of sloshing through the rain with Grandpa, laughing.

We sat there, all of us silent. Then Mom jumped up to bring out dessert: canned peaches, slimy as eels, and Social Tea crackers. And after a while Grandpa put down his napkin. “Maybe we'll fish again tomorrow, Margaret.”

Mom shredded out the fish bones and put what was left on waxed paper for Judy and Jiggs, the cats. They didn't think it was cardboard; they were thrilled.

I went upstairs to take my bath, scraping another smear of red off my ankle. What would Willow Run be like without Grandpa around every two minutes?

I stopped scrubbing. At least he'd never be arrested here with his neighbors, Mrs. Easterly on one side, Mr. Noonan on the other. I picked up the soap again. Willow Run. I told myself I was going to have an adventure, the greatest adventure of my life. So why did I feel so bad?

A few days later, I tiptoed around upstairs. If Mom heard me, she'd have me down in the kitchen in two seconds:
Just spear those pickles into the glass dish, Meggie,
or
Spread a little cream cheese on those chunks of celery, please
.

I leaned way out the bedroom window now, looking for Grandpa: my head, neck, both arms, and belt buckle scraping the sill, my shoe tips scraping the floor.

The shoes were all scratched up from the beach. Mom would have a fit when she saw them. “Leather is rationed, Meggie.
Rationed,
” she'd said, almost crying, when I had left my Sunday ones in the rain last month.

I inched out farther. In back of the houses the Atlantic
Ocean crashed itself up on the sand, and seagulls screeched as they fought over dinner. In front was the gravel road. And any minute Grandpa would march down that road, bringing a salad for our going-to-Willow-Run-to-win-the-war party.

Grandpa hadn't found out about the red paint swastika. “I'll bring the best salad you've ever tasted,” he had promised this morning. Grandpa was in love with food. He and I grew most of it in his jungle of a garden out behind his house. Then we'd trundle it all into his kitchen to snip, and chop, and dice.…

“Slice finely, if you don't mind, Margaret, we don't need onion slices the size of elephant feet.”

I scrambled all the way out the window and across the roof to get a better look at the road. Grandpa would be on time, I knew that; he always was. Four o'clock on the dot.

The church bells began to bong, and there he was.

Bingo.

But good grief. His red plaid hat was clamped down on his head on a day you could fry an egg on the sidewalk! In his outstretched hands, wrapped in see-through waxed paper, was an
Apfelstrudel
.

What happened to the salad?

Strudel!
I would never have thought of it before. But now I realized. A German dessert right in the middle of the war with Germany. What would people think!

I yanked myself back in through the window, stepped
over my suitcase, packed and ready to go, and went downstairs to the party, the neighbors jammed into the living room and spilling out onto the porch.

The back door opened; Grandpa filled up the whole space. “Ah, Mar-gar-et.” He held out the strudel.

“An apple pie.” I grabbed it before he could correct me. “What happened to the salad, for Pete's sake?” I whispered, and then, “Meggie. Don't call me Margaret.”

I didn't wait to hear what I knew he'd say next: “It's your grandmother's name, nothing wrong with Margaret.”

Too old, too grown-up,
I said in my head. I put the strudel on the dining room table, maneuvering a crumb off the edge and onto my tongue. It was my favorite, after all.

I slid away from the table, the taste filling my mouth, as Mom came in with more plates. She spotted my shoes and raised her eyes toward the ceiling.

The front doorbell rang three times,
bing bing bing
. It was my best friend, Lily. She loved the sound of our chimes. She didn't wait for someone to answer but marched right in, her grandmother shaking her head in back of her, as Mom went to say hello.

Lily came into the dining room and looked under a covered dish. “Spam, I knew it.”

“Well, young ladies.” Mr. Colgan came toward us before we could escape, a fistful of peanuts disappearing into his mouth. “Ah, Meggie. Going halfway across the country with your mom and dad, are you?”

I nodded.

Lily bent over to pet the cats under the table. I didn't blame her. Who wanted to be captured by Mr. Colgan?

“I was in Michigan once,” he began. “Did I ever tell you about that? It was in the thirties…”

He might keep me there forever. I circled around him, pretending to straighten the picture on the side table: my brother, Eddie, in his uniform, grinning, a space between his front teeth.

Virginia Tooey, Eddie's girlfriend, came over to look at the picture, too. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. She was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen, with her curly hair and Chiclet teeth. Eddie thought so, too.

In back of me, Mr. Colgan was saying, “Four days to get to Michigan. You'll be a long way from your grandfather.”

An odd thing about Eddie's picture. When I moved it around, it seemed his smiling eyes always followed me. Just beyond the table was the window to the ocean, a sunbeam cutting a path through the water. Suppose I could slide across it all the way to Europe? Would Eddie be there, arms out, waiting to dance me around? Or maybe he was still at Fort Dix in New Jersey, safe, no one shooting at him. Then he'd come home on leave to sit on the bench with Grandpa in his garden or jitterbug with Virginia Tooey at the dance hall on 102nd Street.

We hadn't had a letter from Eddie in seventeen days. Every morning Mom pretended to dust the table,
her cloth circling the lamp as she watched the road for the mailman.

She had asked the mailman over and over to remember that we'd have a new address soon, so worried that Eddie's letters might not get to us.

Please, Eddie, let there be a letter tomorrow. Tell us you weren't at the D-day landing in Normandy. That's what Mom and Dad need to hear.

I told myself I wasn't worried, not one bit. The last thing Eddie had said to me was
“It will be a big adventure, Meggie, that's what this'll be. And just think, you'll be the only one home, the princess. No more baby.”

“Ha. You think I'll get double desserts, double allowance, and Grandpa won't be telling me how wonderful you are every two minutes?”

I went over to the table, happy to see that Mr. Colgan was telling Lily's grandmother about the price of bread and cake and canned beans. I helped myself to supper: a little Spam doctored up with Grandpa's pickles, a mountain of Mom's potato salad with a couple of elephant-foot onion slices, and a lump of oleo for the heel of the rye bread. I went outside to sit with Lily on the back step.

“The oleo is disgusting, isn't it?” I looked down at the white lump with yellow dye running through it in spots, wartime butter.

“Horrible,” Lily agreed.

“I wouldn't smear it on my bread in a million years except
that I'm entering an oleo contest, twenty-five words or less.”

“Great,” Lily mumbled, her mouth full.

“Mmm, mmm, mmm, the tastiest taste in the world, oleo even
…
,”
I began, and broke off. “That's as far as I've gotten.”

Lily sat there nodding and I thought about Grandpa. He was going to skip the oleo contest. “I can't think of one good thing about it,” he had told me.

I looked back through the doorway. He was talking about our soldiers landing in Normandy now, shaking his head over the casualties. His voice was loud… and you could hear the German in it, the roll of the
rrrr
s, the mixed-up
f
s and
v
s. “We have to hope,” he said.
Haf to hope
.

I wondered what Lily thought about his accent. But she was speaking at the same time. “I'm going to miss you.”

I couldn't help feeling sorry for her. I was going to have this tremendous adventure, and she was stuck in Rockaway.

Lily turned to me. “About the candy,” she began.

I swallowed. Lily and I had found a bag of candy that Mom had planned on sending to Eddie. We had eaten a ton of it.

“I'm sorry about that,” she said.

My mouth watered when I thought of it. “Just as well we ate some of it,” I said, feeling a little guilty anyway. “Eddie always gets cavities.”

“But your mom,” Lily said.

I didn't answer. Mom had been furious about sending only half the candy. We went back inside then, and I edged around to Grandpa, who was still wearing that miserable hat, and tapped his arm. “I'll take that for you.”

His hand went up absently, his thin hair rising as he slid the hat off his head.

With my plate in one hand I went to the kitchen door and tossed the hat onto a chair. Dad was cutting into a huge watermelon at the counter. He grinned when he saw the hat. And Virginia Tooey had come into the kitchen. Mom, an apron tied around her middle, was leaning against the sink talking to her, smiling. Mom was round as a dumpling, but when she smiled there was no one as pretty.

She handed me a plate of celery and olives. “Meggie, just put this …” She turned back to Virginia without finishing.

I found a place for it on the dining room table and stood next to Lily. Jiggs meowed underneath and I bent over to give him a taste of Spam. He took one sniff, then walked away. “I don't blame him,” I told Lily.

And there was Mr. Colgan, everyone veering away from him as if he were the blind man in blindman's buff. “Bet you'll miss your grandpa.” He leaned forward to spear a slice of cheese and fly it over my shoulder into his mouth.

I knew Grandpa could hear him. “Dad has a job for the war effort,” I said. “We'll be home as soon as it's over.”

Mr. Colgan reached for another slice of cheese, his eyes glued to me so I couldn't escape. “Hey, Meggie. Why isn't
your grandfather going with you? Plenty of room in the car.” He nudged me. “Isn't that a great idea?”

I wished I could back away from him and slide out the door. Grandpa's eyes were on me now. I didn't want to look at him, but my eyes went up to his face. Was he sad that we were going without him?

I could feel it in my chest: no one knew me in Michigan. No one knew that Grandpa had taught me to count in German:
eins, zwei, drei, vier, fünf;
no one like Mikey or the Muscle Man would wonder if Grandpa and I were secretly hoping that Germany would win the war. No one would lock him up in a prison there…or worse.

“How can I leave?” Grandpa said. “I have a garden to grow, and I have to wait for Eddie.…”

I took another forkful of potato salad. “Right,” I said to Mr. Colgan. “He has to stay here.”

He'd be safer in Rockaway, even those boys had said so. And then it was time for Lily and her grandmother to leave. I went to the door with them, still thinking about Grandpa, and gave Lily a hug.

“See you soon,” she said.

“After the war.” I wondered how long that would be.

“Just for the duration.” We both smiled. That was what everyone said all the time.

Last day. I said goodbye to Lily one last time and sneaked her a key to our house so she could go up to the attic and write a book. I'd even left a piece of candy for her up there.

I skated down the street trying to miss the cracks as I counted blue stars in the windows: six of them, six families who had soldiers fighting in the war, and one gold star in the Winstons’ window for Eddie's friend Bobby, a great basketball player, who had been killed in action.

We had a blue star in our own window for Eddie. For a quick moment I closed my eyes thinking about him, his forehead always sunburned, his cap pushed back over his hair.

A letter had finally arrived this morning. It crinkled in
my pocket. I reached in to touch it, Eddie's writing all over it, then turned up Grandpa's path. The banner with his star for Eddie was looped over the knocker on the door instead of hanging in the window like everyone else's. That was Grandpa. Always different.

“Hey, Grandpa?” I unstrapped my skates and left them on the stoop, then took a few giant steps through the living room and into the kitchen. A row of jars marched along the counter, pickle jars, but not holding pickles. Each one had a half-dead sprig of a plant that Grandpa was bringing back to life. Here and there ghostly roots were beginning to sprout.

“Grandpa?” I called again.

Not in the house. Of course not. Outside in his victory garden with the bugs and spiny cucumbers. Ah, not cucumbers yet, just yellow buds. It was only the beginning of July, after all.

I banged out of the kitchen into the yard, catching my heel. I had a hundred blisters from that screen door. But no more. After today I wouldn't see that door again, nor Grandpa's counter filled with jars of green things, nor the cucumber vat on the linoleum floor with pickles swimming around inside. Not until the end of the war. I swallowed thinking of it.

“He's probably out there in the yard dreaming about pickle relish,” I said to myself, but under my breath. Lots of things were wrong with Grandpa, but being deaf wasn't one. He always heard more than I wanted him to.

Right. There he was, but he wasn't bent over like a pretzel pulling weeds out of his victory garden. He was under the only tree in the whole yard, a pile of papers on his lap, his red plaid cap pulled down over his eyes.

Why was he just sitting there?

I felt a clutch somewhere in my chest. Grandpa was old. He had even been in the U.S. Army in the Great War. He still talked about it even though it must have been a million years ago, when he had first come to this country from Germany.