Dinah Forever Read online

  In Little Women, Dinah suddenly remembered, Jo refused to marry Laurie because she and Laurie were too much alike, both with strong wills and hot tempers. Dinah and Nick were alike in that way, too.

  And their stormy times had definitely come sooner rather than later.

  Upstairs in her room, Dinah took Nick’s postcards out from under her pillow. It was time to rip them each into a million pieces. She’d do the Buckingham Palace card first; it was the one Nick had sent her first. Or maybe she’d do the Stonehenge card first. It was the one that had the word love on it. Dinah read both cards over again, trying to decide. Maybe she should just close her eyes and rip them both together.

  But—in a way it was stupid to rip up somebody’s postcards just because you hated him. It wasn’t the postcards’ fault that the boy who had written them had turned out to be so unworthy of her affections. Why take out her feelings on two helpless little rectangles of glossy cardboard?

  Dinah reread the messages on the cards one last time. Then she buried the cards underneath a stack of sweaters in her bottom bureau drawer.

  * * *

  Sunday morning, early, while her parents and Benjamin were still asleep, Dinah got up and wrote them a note saying that she was walking over to Mrs. Briscoe’s house. It was cooler than it had been the night before, and the dew was thick on the tangle of wildflowers in Mrs. Briscoe’s small, unkempt front yard. Mrs. Briscoe was a morning person—up before dawn and in bed not much past dark—so Dinah knew it was all right to ring her bell at seven-thirty in the morning.

  “Dinah, come in!” Mrs. Briscoe ushered Dinah into her untidy kitchen and began brewing a pot of tea.

  Mrs. Briscoe drank hot tea summer and winter, and now Dinah did, too. Mrs. Briscoe never made tea with a tea bag. She made it the proper English way, with loose tea in a tea ball, steeped in a real china teapot. But Mrs. Briscoe’s teapot wasn’t a proper English teapot: It was in the shape of a cheerful, plump, bright green bullfrog. Mrs. Briscoe had a wonderful collection of all kinds of frogs and toads.

  Dinah waited until she had a steaming teacup in front of her. “Nick and I had a fight,” she began.

  When she had told the story to her parents last night, her father had looked amused and her mother had looked worried. Mrs. Briscoe just listened. Maybe the best relationships came when one person was a talker and one was a listener. Dinah was a talker, obviously. Mrs. Briscoe was a listener. Suzanne was a listener. Nick was a talker. That alone explained a lot about their breakup.

  “So you were right after all,” Dinah finished. “It did fade over the summer.”

  “Maybe,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “But sometimes it can take a while to get used to someone again, when you’ve been apart. I remember when Eddie came home from the war, I expected to be wild with joy about having him with me again, safe and sound. And then all we did was quarrel, about nothing at all, for months on end.”

  “You didn’t throw a pie in his face, did you?” Dinah asked hopefully.

  “No, but I did set his suitcase out on the front stoop one morning—we were living in Baltimore—and he had to go out in his pajamas to retrieve it. And then I bolted the front door behind him.”

  Dinah took the first sip of her now-lukewarm tea. It was funny to imagine gentle-voiced Mrs. Briscoe so fiery. “What happened then?”

  “Then from my front window I saw my nosy neighbor, Lillian Sawhurst, coming out with her broom to sweep—and to spy. I felt so mortified that I opened the front door faster than it takes to tell it and let Eddie back in again.”

  “Was he mad?”

  Mrs. Briscoe took the last sip of her own tea. “He was mad,” she said, “but he and I both had quick, hot tempers, and those kinds of folks never stay mad for long.”

  So Mr. and Mrs. Briscoe had both had hot tempers. That worked against Dinah’s theory.

  “Would you say that Mr. Briscoe was a talker or a listener?”

  “Oh, Eddie was a talker. He could talk harder and faster than anyone I ever met, until you, Dinah. That was the hardest thing for me to get used to after he died—the silence in the house. All day long, every day, the house was so quiet.”

  Mrs. Briscoe had tears in her eyes. Dinah looked away. She wanted to say something comforting, but Mrs. Briscoe was better at comforting her than she was at comforting Mrs. Briscoe.

  “That’s all right, Dinah,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “I love talking about Eddie, even when the memories are sad ones. And my house has been a lot less quiet since I met you.”

  * * *

  Back home again, in time for a second breakfast, Dinah called Suzanne, but she was already at church. Benjamin was in his high chair, pushing buttons at random on his toy tape recorder. Her father was sitting next to him, at the kitchen table, trying to read the first chapter of his brand-new biology book. After ten years in the Navy and another ten years of working as the manager of a sporting goods store, Dinah’s father was going back to college to finish his undergraduate degree. He was still keeping the same schedule at the store, so he had to use every spare minute at home to study.

  He looked up from his book as Dinah came into the kitchen. “I got your note. You were up and out early this morning,” he said.

  “I wanted to talk to Mrs. Briscoe.” Dinah toasted herself an English muffin and sat down next to her father at the table.

  “How’s biology?” she asked.

  “Do you know,” her father said, “that I am the only male in my class not wearing a baseball cap backward?”

  “You could do it,” Dinah said. “You have a million baseball caps down at the store.”

  Her father shook his head. “Forty is the cutoff for backward baseball caps. I have to admit that I’m feeling rather ancient these days. And these young kids in my class are a lot more used to hitting the books than I am. But maybe age will turn out to have some advantages, as well. Let’s see how I do on my first exam.”

  The morning dragged on. Dinah kept calling Suzanne’s house, but Suzanne wasn’t back from church yet. She called Blaine Yarborough, another friend from school, but Blaine wasn’t home, either. Dinah’s father finished the first chapter in his biology book and started on the second one. Her mother was making her usual thorough list of everything to do for the week ahead. Benjamin was involved in his own project, taking Duplos from the big Duplo tub, putting them all into an old shoe box, then taking them out of the shoe box and putting them back into the tub again.

  Dinah wondered what Nick was doing. Had he torn up her two postcards—the one from Ocean City and the one from the Inner Harbor in Baltimore? Probably he had never even saved them in the first place.

  “Can I take Benjamin out for a walk in the stroller?” Dinah asked.

  Her mother glanced out the kitchen window at the thermometer. “It’s awfully hot out.”

  “Just for a little walk.”

  Benjamin was already by the kitchen door, his Duplo-transfer project abandoned. He loved his stroller.

  Dinah’s mother rubbed sun block on Benjamin’s legs and arms, while Dinah dabbed his chubby cheeks. “Keep the awning up over him,” her mother said.

  Outside, the heat and humidity weighed on Dinah like a sopping wet blanket. She walked to Suzanne’s house, one block down and one block over. No one answered the doorbell there. Then she found herself walking another block to Nick’s street, Barclay Court. Maybe Nick would be outside, shooting baskets at the hoop hung over his garage, in a pathetic effort to overcome his grief at losing her.

  He wasn’t.

  Maybe he was inside, ripping up postcards. Dinah wasn’t about to ring his bell to find out. Afraid he might have seen her from a front window, she turned and hastily pushed Benjamin’s stroller back to neutral territory.

  Just as she had reached her own street, she saw him, walking down the hill toward her, his hands jammed in the pockets of his baggy shorts.

  He saw her, too. Dinah met his eyes for one second. Then she looked away. Unless one of them crossed to th
e other side of the street, or stepped aside, or turned to flee, they would walk right smack into each other in two more minutes.

  Dinah made herself keep on walking. Now she and Nick were on the same block. The sidewalk wasn’t wide enough for her to pass him with the stroller. Would Nick step aside or would she? Or would they collide head-on like two locomotives barreling toward each other on a single stretch of track?

  Dinah looked up. Nick was standing still, right in front of her, blocking her way. She couldn’t tell if he looked mad or not. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t frowning, either. Dinah didn’t think she could bear it if he walked past her without speaking.

  “Frizz Head,” Nick said, almost like a question.

  Dinah knew then what she had to say next. “I—I’m sorry about—the pie.” And suddenly she was sorry. You can’t go around throwing pies at people whenever they don’t act exactly the way you want them to act. She couldn’t hate Nick for being a talker, when she was a talker, too. Maybe it was good to be alike, even if this sometimes made for a stormy relationship.

  “Just remember, I owe you one,” Nick said. “Sometime, someplace, there’s a big fat piece of cream pie out there with your name on it.”

  “Oh, there is, is there?” Dinah asked, so happy that she felt like dancing in the ninety-five-degree midday heat, as Nick fell into step beside her, pushing the stroller home.

  Three

  Dinah had been so busy breaking up with Nick and then getting back together with him again that she was almost surprised to find herself standing at the bus stop Monday morning with Suzanne, waiting for the first day of seventh grade to begin. Seventh grade! Not that seventh grade was all that alarming. It wasn’t like sixth grade, when everyone had to get used to the whole new world of a whole new school. Seventh grade was just—seventh grade, a comfortable in-between kind of year.

  Even though Dinah and Suzanne each had a boyfriend this year—Nick for Dinah and Greg Thomas for Suzanne—they sat together on the bus as they had every year since they had become best friends back in third grade. But Dinah was conscious of Nick sitting a few rows behind her. It was strange and wonderful to think that there was a boy on this very bus who had kissed her just the night before.

  “I’m still scared,” Suzanne confessed to Dinah. “I don’t care if we are seventh graders. We’re still going to have new classes and new teachers. Tom told me that seventh-grade math is practically like algebra.”

  Suzanne’s older brother Tom was a senior in high school.

  “And it’s, like, in seventh grade you have no excuse for anything anymore. In sixth grade you mess up and everyone says, ‘Oh, she’s just a sixth grader.’ Now they’ll say, ‘Hey, you, how come you’re still messing up in seventh grade?’”

  “We won’t mess up,” Dinah said. “We’ll make Tom help us with math if we need it. You’ll be elected class secretary again, and Blaine’ll be president, and we’ll get all the best parts in Drama Club, and Nick and I are going to be the champions of the debate team. Mr. Roemer might as well clear out the front display case right now to make room for all our trophies.”

  Suzanne laughed. “It’ll be better than sixth grade,” she agreed.

  Homerooms were assigned alphabetically; Suzanne wasn’t in Dinah’s homeroom, but Nick was. Their homeroom teacher this year was their social studies teacher from last year, Mr. Dixon, who also would be the coach for the new debate team. When Dinah heard the principal, Mr. Roemer, clear his throat over the PA system before saying, “Please rise and salute the flag,” her heart sang with joy at the familiarity of it all.

  Dinah had loved morning announcements ever since the first day of sixth grade. She listened with eager anticipation as Mr. Roemer read, “I want to call to your attention that our school has been thoroughly cleaned over the summer. All offensive remarks have been removed from lavatory doors. All gum has been removed from underneath classroom and library desks. Let me ask for your cooperation in maintaining these standards of cleanliness throughout the coming year, so that JFK Middle School will look as fresh and inviting in June as it does today.”

  Mr. Roemer’s remarks gave Dinah a sudden keen longing for gum, with all its comic possibilities. Across the aisle from her, Nick pretended to take a wad of gum out of his mouth and stick it under his seat. Dinah’s friend Blaine shook her head at him sternly. Nick pretended to pop the gum back into his mouth, with a wink at Dinah. It was just the kind of thing Dinah herself would have done. She smiled to herself.

  Mr. Roemer read more: announcements about other rules, about the first soccer match of the season, about next week’s activities fair. Then he said, “Let me end this morning’s announcements by sharing with you a poem by the great American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.”

  Dinah and Nick looked at each other. This was something new. Dinah couldn’t remember any occasion in the past on which a poem had been part of morning announcements.

  “The poem is called ‘A Psalm of Life,’” Mr. Roemer said, making his voice sound extra grand and solemn.

  “Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

  Life is but an empty dream!

  For the soul is dead that slumbers,

  And things are not what they seem.”

  It was a long poem, and when Mr. Roemer finished, some of the boys sitting near Dinah made groaning, gagging noises. But Dinah sat enthralled. She hadn’t understood all of the poem, but certain lines sang themselves over again in her head.

  Lives of great men all remind us

  We can make our lives sublime,

  And, departing, leave behind us

  Footprints on the sands of time.

  Footprints on the sands of time! How could Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have known that that was precisely what Dinah planned to leave behind her during seventh grade?

  * * *

  It turned out that Dinah and Nick had three classes together—English, science, and math—as well as lunch. When Suzanne and Dinah ran to compare schedules after homeroom, they found that they had those same classes together, plus social studies. They hugged each other with relief.

  Math, first period, looked hard, but Ms. Lewis was young and funny. She liked to talk with an exaggerated New York accent; she called the class “youse guys.”

  Ms. Dunne, the second-period English teacher, looked young, too. Her bright red lipstick matched her bright red earrings, bright red blazer, and bright red shoes. When Dinah closed her eyes a moment to rest from all the bright red, she saw a ghostly negative of Ms. Dunne, a dark blob surrounded by a bright aura.

  “I’m so glad that Mr. Roemer began our school year with a poem this morning,” Ms. Dunne said. “We’re going to be writing a great deal of poetry in seventh-grade English. To get us started, let’s all take out a piece of paper and a writing utensil. Write a poem on any subject. I’m not going to be grading it. In fact, I never grade student poetry. Poetry isn’t something you write for a grade. It’s something you write for your soul.”

  Sitting in front of Dinah, Artie Adams snickered. Artie’s soul had no poetry in it whatsoever.

  Dinah had a very poetic soul—at least she thought she did—but she wasn’t sure she could write a poem on command, at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. She used to try writing poems when she was younger, but she had always gotten stuck after the first line. Today she was stuck before the first line.

  Glancing around the room, Dinah saw blank sheets of paper on every desk, even Blaine’s. No one had written anything.

  Nick put up his hand. Dinah felt proud of him for being the one to break the silence. “Don’t we have to be—you know—inspired or something?”

  Ms. Dunne shook her head. “Someone once said that genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. The same is true of poetry.”

  Nick’s friend Jason Winfield sniffed loudly at his armpit. Ms. Dunne ignored him.

  “Today I’m going to let you all flounder for a bit, to see how you make out by yourselves. But on ot
her days I’ll have a number of exercises to share with you, exercises to help get the poetic juices flowing. We’ll be reading a lot of poetry, too, and that will help as well. I have taught seventh-grade English for ten years now, and one thing I have discovered is that there is a poet inside of everybody.”

  Artie thrust up his hand. Ms. Dunne consulted her seating chart. “Artie?”

  “There is no poet inside of me,” Artie said loudly.

  Ms. Dunne smiled. “Every year some student tells me that on the first day of class, and every year that very student turns out to have a gift for poetry that he never even dreamed of.”

  That silenced Artie. Dinah stared at her empty sheet of paper.

  “Do our poems have to rhyme?” someone else asked.

  “How long do they have to be?”

  “Can you give us kind of a suggestion for what they should be about?”

  “A poem does not have to rhyme. It can be any length. As for a subject, how about beginnings? Now, that’s all I’m going to say to you today. You have the rest of the period to write.”

  Beginnings. That helped a little. And it wasn’t going to be graded.

  Dinah picked up her pen and scribbled one word, then another. Five minutes later she was done. She read her poem over to herself.

  Beginnings

  Birth—

  Dawn—

  Spring—

  Deep in my heart

  A tiny voice

  Begins to sing.

  For this is

  The start of

  Everything.

  It wasn’t as good as “footprints on the sands of time,” but it was pretty good for a first try, on the first day of seventh grade. It was a good beginning.

  * * *

  Dinah had Miss Brady again, from sixth grade, for gym during third period, and her same teacher from last year, Mr. Maurer, for fourth-period music. Even the food at lunch was the same as the food from sixth grade. The lukewarm macaroni-and-beef casserole and stale cherry pie could have been left over from the last day of school in June. But last year, Dinah and her friends had eaten at an all-girls table. This year, Greg Thomas came over to sit with Suzanne, and Nick took the empty seat next to Dinah. Nick picked up his plate of pie and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand, as if deciding whether to eat it or to throw it. Dinah felt herself blushing.