One Square Inch Read online

  “We were robbed!” She laughed loudly. “Every single judge voted for your Mr. Pasta! Talk about rigged. Mousse is so last year. People are moussed out. Moussed up!” She exploded into laughter again. Over her spasm of giggles she could hardly get the next word out. “Mousstified!”

  She was still laughing as we trailed behind her to the car.

  That night I woke up abruptly in the darkness. I could hear music playing on the stereo downstairs: a driving bluegrass fiddle CD Mom liked to play to pump herself up when she was working. The clock on my nightstand read 3:15. I didn’t know if she was up late, or up early, or was never going to go to bed at all. She didn’t really have a choice: it was the night before Carly’s play—no, the morning of Carly’s play. I measured the time in my head: the play was going to begin at 7 p.m., in a little less than sixteen hours.

  Thirsty now, I crept down the hall to the bathroom and gulped a glass of water. Then I stole soundlessly to the top of the stairs and peered down from the dimness of the landing to the glaring brightness of the living room. In the few moments that it took my eyes to adjust to the light, I willed the gingerbread house to be finished, every candy decoration painted, ready to be nibbled on by a hungry Hansel and Gretel. But it wasn’t.

  The house looked the same as it had before I left for “Pasta Live,” painted in meticulous detail on the left side of the door while the right side stood bare. A heap of wire coat hangers, intended to form the bars of Hansel’s cage, covered the couch. No progress at all had been made on the oven.

  Go back to bed, I told myself.

  I tiptoed downstairs and through the living room, past the abandoned dining room table buried under bolts of fabric and flyers printed up for the art show at the Community Table. Mom was sitting on the yellow-stained kitchen floor, with all the contents from the pantry cupboard spread out around her.

  She whirled her head around. “Cooper! You startled me!”

  I flinched, startled myself, afraid of what she would say next.

  But she was smiling. “We have lived in this house for ten years!” she exclaimed. “Ten years! And this is the first time anyone has thoroughly cleaned and organized this pantry. Look at this stuff!” She gestured to half a dozen cereal boxes. “Doesn’t anyone in this family ever throw away a cereal box once it’s empty? You’d think we were maintaining a cereal box museum. And talk about crumbs! Why we haven’t had a whole civilization of mice established here I’ll never know.”

  For the first time she seemed to remember that it was three in the morning. Her face softened with concern. “What is it, Coopster? Did you have a bad dream? Do you feel sick?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I can make you some warm milk. Are you hungry? How about a bowl of cereal? But don’t touch any of these! They’re all too old. I’m going to make a spreadsheet on the computer for our cereal inventory. Every time we buy a new box, I’ll enter it on the spreadsheet, with its expiration date, and once a month I’ll go through the pantry and toss any old boxes that aren’t fit to eat. I’m going to put a sticker on each box when it comes in. Every month will have a different color. Then it will be easy for all of us to keep track of the dates. So far I’ve done blue for September, and red for October, and yellow for November.”

  Sure enough, I saw a row of stickered cereal boxes lined up on the floor in front of the oven door.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “I was thirsty, so I got a drink of water, and I heard the music playing, so I came downstairs to see what was going on.”

  “What’s going on,” my mother said, raising her voice exultantly over the crescendo of the fiddle music, “is that this family is finally getting organized!”

  I looked again at the five cereal boxes, two with red stickers, one with a blue sticker, and two with yellow stickers. Beneath my thin pajama top, my heart pounded as if I had sprinted around the middle school track.

  I’m scared, I wanted to cry, and then maybe she would hold me on her lap and hug me as if I was little like Carly. But I couldn’t.

  Because what I was scared of was her.

  16

  At breakfast, Mom was as exuberant as she had been at three in the morning. The contents of the pantry cupboard remained spread out over the kitchen floor.

  “Don’t say it!” she warned Carly, in a teasing tone. “ ‘The house isn’t finished, the cage isn’t finished, where is the oven?’ The play isn’t until seven tonight. It’s only seven a.m. now. I have twelve more hours!”

  “Mrs. Brattle keeps asking about it. She wants us to be able to practice with the real cage and real oven. Right now we’re just using a chair for the cage and a big cardboard box for the oven, and pretending they’re real.”

  “Pretending is good for the imagination.” Mom’s voice had become less lilting. “Look, if the school is going to rely on the volunteer efforts of busy working moms who have a thousand other things to do, they have to be willing to be flexible. They can’t expect us to drop everything else in our lives, can they?”

  No, I thought, they can’t expect you to postpone an important job like labeling all the cereal boxes in the pantry.

  Her face brightened again. “Don’t worry, honey. I’m not going to let you down, I promise.”

  “I know,” Carly said. It hurt my heart how much Carly still seemed to believe her.

  To my surprise and relief, nobody at school said anything about my mother, except for one kid in the Food Fun class who called over to me, “Your mother’s weird!” Ben silenced the kid with a look.

  Instead of cooking that day, we ate the leftover intermission snacks while Mr. Pasta praised our performance at “Pasta Live.” I had been afraid that we would watch the videotape of the show. We didn’t, but then I worried that maybe we didn’t watch it just because of the awful half that had my mother in it.

  Lindsay came over to me after the bell rang. “Were you nervous?” she asked.

  I didn’t know what she meant: nervous being onstage with Mom, wondering what crazy thing she would do next?

  “Being onstage, doing the helping?” she continued. “I was sure I’d mess up, and Mr. Pasta would lose, and it would be my fault.”

  “Well, your team didn’t lose. Our team lost.” I knew I sounded like a poor sport.

  “Of course your team lost! Nobody can beat Mr. Pasta’s cooking,” Lindsay said consolingly. “That’s why if I had messed up, and he had lost, I would have felt so guilty.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” I said again. I turned away and hurried to my next class, sick inside at how I had acted, but it was all for the best in the end: Lindsay wasn’t going to be able to go on liking someone with a mother who was that weird.

  Thinking about Mom’s hideous scene at “Pasta Live” was bad; thinking about the unfinished set for Carly’s play was worse. Maybe I could make a halfway decent cage out of the wire hangers. I wished I could get Ben and Spencer to come over after school to help, but I was too ashamed: ashamed of what our house looked like, ashamed of my mom, ashamed of what had happened at “Pasta Live,” ashamed of myself for having let it happen.

  When the bell rang at the end of eighth-period social studies, Mr. Stuart stopped by my desk.

  “Hey, Coop,” he said.

  I hurriedly stuffed my binder into my backpack.

  “I just wanted to make sure your mother was doing all right.”

  “You mean her hand?” But I knew that wasn’t all that Mr. Stuart meant. “Sure, it’s fine. It’s all good.”

  “Cooper, if you ever need to talk, remember that I’m here.”

  But I had already shrugged on my backpack and headed out the door.

  When I arrived home at three-thirty, the first thing I saw was my mother, pliers in hand, putting the final touches on a cleverly constructed wire cage standing in the middle of the living room. The oven—a large, papier-mâché dome painted to look like bricks—was finished, too. The gingerbread house was still only half painted, but I could take care of tha
t in an hour or two. The candy decorations didn’t have to be perfect, whatever Michelangelo’s views would have been on the subject. They just had to be done.

  By five o’clock the house was completed. I felt giddy with relief. I remembered the best line from “Jabberwocky”: “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” The whole world was bursting with glorious frabjousness.

  “We have to be at school by six-fifteen to get our costumes on,” Carly announced. “What if I forget my lines? What if I can’t remember a single word?”

  “Won’t there be a prompter?” I asked. “Someone standing offstage who can read you the lines if you forget them? Besides, you won’t forget them. You’ve only practiced them forty-three million times.”

  Mom was going to drop us off in the station wagon with the gingerbread house and then return to get the oven and the cage.

  “I’ll see you in ten minutes,” she said, as we stood by the side door of the school with the sections of the gingerbread house lying on the ground beside us. “I need to swing by the Community Table to drop off these flyers for the art show, and then I’ll head back home for the oven and cage. Don’t worry, I can get them into the car on my own. Break a leg, my darling Gretel!”

  Carly looked bewildered.

  “It means ‘good luck,’ ” I told her. “Theater people always say it. Why, I don’t know.”

  A couple of arriving dads helped me carry the gingerbread house into the gym. Carly danced off to get dressed in her Gretel costume. Once the house was set up on the stage, I chose two seats in the third row of folding chairs, one for me and one for my mom.

  Carly’s teacher, who had been my teacher, too, tapped me on the shoulder. “The house is beautiful!” she gushed. “Your mother is so creative! I have to say I was getting a bit frantic this last day or two: I don’t like to cut things this close. But this house was definitely worth the wait.”

  I forced a smile. “Mom usually comes through.”

  I hoped it was true. Everything had changed so much in the last few months that I didn’t know what usually meant for my mother anymore.

  “Where is your mom?” Mrs. Brattle asked. “Is she getting the oven and cage from the car? I can send some kids out to help her.”

  “No, she had to run one quick errand. She’ll be here any minute.”

  Mrs. Brattle looked at her watch. I looked at mine, too: 6:40.

  The teacher turned away and bustled off to help one of the birds who had misplaced her beak. I alternated between looking at my watch—6:41, 6:42, 6:43—and twisting around in my seat to see if my mom was coming through the back doors of the gym.

  Maybe I should wait for her in the parking lot? I left my jacket spread out over the two chairs to hold our place.

  Car after car pulled into the parking lot, but not our station wagon. Finally, when my watch said 6:59, I abandoned my post and hurried back to my seat. I couldn’t miss Carly’s grand entrance, when she would utter the first line of the entire play. Anxiety churned in my stomach. What would they use as a cage for Hansel? Or an oven for the wicked witch?

  At ten past seven, Mom still hadn’t arrived—unless she had come in a different door? And carried the missing set pieces backstage?

  The lights in the gym were turned off, and Mrs. Brattle came forward to welcome the audience. Her speech seemed longer than it needed to be, as if she were trying to stall for time.

  At last the play began. Carly walked up the steps to the stage with the second grader who was playing Hansel. They stood together in front of the closed curtain: Carly had told me that the curtain wouldn’t go up to reveal the gingerbread house until later on.

  “Hansel, I’m hungry!”

  “Poor Father has no food for us to eat.”

  I hardly listened. How long could it possibly take someone to drop off some flyers at a building not half a mile away? Of course, Mom also had to go home and pick up the cage and oven. But still.

  Hansel and Gretel wandered through the make-believe woods, accompanied by a parade of twittering birds and furry woodland animals. Exhausted, they fell asleep.

  Then the curtain rose. A murmur of appreciation ran through the audience. The gingerbread house did look perfect, like a house for a play on Broadway, a house that would have done Michelangelo proud. One glance told me that the oven and cage still weren’t there.

  Hansel and Gretel woke up and exclaimed over the gingerbread house with delight. Cautiously they began taking small pretend bites out of one of the chocolate-colored shutters.

  “Nibble, nibble, little mousie. Who’s that nibbling at my housie?” cried Jodie, the witch, who looked about as terrifying as a second grader could be.

  It came time for the witch to put Hansel into the cage. Mrs. Brattle darted onto the stage, carrying a tall chair with a back made of wooden rungs. It must have been the chair they had used in rehearsal. Crouched behind the chair, Hansel could poke his finger through the rungs so that the witch could feel how well he was fattening.

  But a chair didn’t really look anything like a cage.

  From the other side of the stage, Mrs. Brattle shoved out a large cardboard carton. The front-facing side had a cutout door, fastened on with duct tape.

  But a cardboard carton didn’t really look anything like an oven.

  With a coaxing smile, the witch tried to get Gretel to test the heat of the oven. Gretel pretended not to know how to do it.

  “Please show me, kind mother.”

  Impatient, the witch yanked open the cardboard door. Gretel pounced. With all her might she shoved the witch inside.

  Thud! The carton crashed over backward. Unseen, the witch emitted one horrified wail.

  Gales of laughter erupted from the audience. Behind his chair cage, even Hansel was convulsed with giggles. The only two people who weren’t laughing were me and Carly, who had frozen in place, as if overcome by the destruction she had wrought.

  Mrs. Brattle rushed onstage to see if Jodie was all right. The audience applauded when Jodie emerged from the carton, evidently unharmed. Jodie gave them a shaky wave.

  What would happen now? The story couldn’t end with the witch leaping out of the oven to be comforted by her teacher and cheered by the crowd.

  After a whispered conference with Mrs. Brattle, the witch stepped back inside the oven. The teacher closed the makeshift oven door and retreated out of sight. Now Gretel could free Hansel from his chair cage, take the witch’s treasure, and head back to the woodcutter’s cottage.

  I waited for Carly to say her line: “Hansel, the witch is dead! Now we can go home to Father!”

  No words came out of Carly’s mouth.

  I strained my ears to hear if the offstage prompter would whisper the line. The silence stretched on. Finally, Hansel himself hissed to her, “Hansel, the witch is dead!”

  The man sitting behind me chuckled. I hadn’t known I could hate anyone the way I hated him.

  Carly opened her mouth. “Hansel—”

  Her face crumpled, and she ran offstage.

  That was the end of the play. Mrs. Brattle came onstage and in a narrator’s voice gave the conclusion of the story: Hansel and Gretel’s reunion with their father, news of the death of their wicked stepmother, and “They all lived happily ever after.” The actors came out for their bows, first the birds and the forest animals, then the father and stepmother, then Jodie as the witch, and then, all by himself, Hansel. Gretel never appeared.

  Someone from the audience called out, “Gretel!” A few other parents took up the chant, but Mrs. Brattle silenced them with a wave of her hand. After one last round of applause for the entire cast, the curtain came down.

  I ran up the steps by the side of the stage and behind the heavy purple velvet curtain. Mrs. Brattle had her arm around Carly, who was crying as if her heart would break. Jodie hovered next to them, together with a few somber, stricken birds.

  When Carly saw me, she broke free of Mrs. Brattle and ran into my embrace. “Oh, Cooper!” She buried her fac
e in my shirt.

  At that moment, my mom pushed her way through the curtain, carrying the wire cage.

  “You’re too late,” I announced. “In case you haven’t noticed, the play is over.”

  She had looked distraught, out of breath, her hair disheveled, but at my hostile tone, she drew herself upright.

  “And you’ve never been late for anything, I suppose? Cooper, I was up all night working, and most of the night before that. When I left the Community Table, I was so exhausted I was starting to fall asleep at the wheel, so I pulled over and took a nap for just a few minutes. Is that a crime?”

  “Look at Carly!” The harsh, angry voice didn’t feel like my own. “She’s crying.”

  “And it’s all my fault?” Mom demanded.

  I didn’t reply.

  She turned and marched back out of the gym, still lugging the wire-hanger cage. I had no choice but to grab Carly’s hand and hurry after her.

  I hated her even more than I hated the man who had laughed when Carly forgot her line. It was a crime to have ruined Carly’s play, and I would never forgive her for it as long as I lived.

  17

  After school the next day, I finished my homework right away—all I had was math—and went to Carly’s room. She had the Inchland deeds—Gran-Dan’s deeds for the eight square inches of the Yukon—spread out on her table, next to her stack of Inchland drawings and Inchitella and Parsley’s furnished stable.

  I sat down next to her. “You took the deeds out of your treasure box.”

  “I wanted to look at them. You look at them, Cooper. It doesn’t say anywhere on them that they’re only good for a little while, does it?”

  “You mean do they have an expiration date? Like coupons at the grocery store?”

  Once upon a time my mom had gone grocery shopping every week with a sheaf of coupons clipped from the Sunday newspaper advertising circulars, and Carly and I had helped her find the coupon items. It had made grocery shopping feel like a treasure hunt.