Two
I’d never heard of Wisbech, Ohio.[i]
So when Father told me that we would be moving there, I just looked at him
blankly and waited for more information.
Father looked back, then said, “It’s a
small town—just a little east of Cleveland. Not far from the Lake Erie shore.”
He had found a house there—an old, old
place, he told me, a place that was in some ways very similar, I admit, to
where we were currently living. Father loved old houses. I did, too—though I’d
never lived in a newer one.
“I think you’ll feel at home there,” he
said. “I think it will seem … familiar.” He looked at me. “And different, too …
different enough to … to …”
I offered a weak smile in return. I didn’t
want Father to feel bad. I felt bad enough for the both of us.
Father went on. “It will take us awhile
to pack up and leave,” he said. “The good news is that you’ll probably miss
some weeks of school.”
That was
good news. As I’ve said, I couldn’t imagine having to go back to school
in Franconia, having to deal with all the drama about the death of
Gil—especially from kids who’d never said a kind word to or about him the whole
time he was … alive.
But “Okay” was all I could manage.
***
And it did
take us a long time to pack up that old house—especially all the scientific
equipment I’d assembled in my basement laboratory.[ii]
It was fortunate it had been—and would be—a mild fall, lasting clear into early
November, a period we had learned to call “Indian Summer.”[iii]
Anyway, Father had assured me there was an
even better space for all of it in
the new place he’d found.
We also had to sell our old house, of
course. And that happened very quickly. In fact, the first day we put the For
Sale sign out in the yard.
The buyer was Mr. Leon, the Franconia
school custodian. As I mentioned in an earlier collection of these papers, he
had lived in that house before, as a boy. So it made a kind of sense, I
guess—getting back the old family home. Living there again.
As I said, it took some weeks to pack it
all up. I didn’t go to school most of those days. But when I did, I was a
ghost. No one seemed to see me—or speak to me. And I certainly didn’t speak to them.
I felt like a prisoner, putting in time before release.
Then Father rented a truck, and off we
drove in early October, leaving Franconia, heading north. We drove right by the
middle school (where I should have been sitting in class), out past the
Franconia Settlers Cemetery (where the original founders of the town had long
lain), a spot which, of course, reminded me of Gil—in more ways than one. And,
finally, past the Franconia town limits, where I thought I saw, in a stand of trees,
a ghostly image of Gil, staring at us as we drove by.
I took a quick glance at Father—had he seen it, too?
But his eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
Just like Father—hard to distract …
***
Father was right: In some ways Wisbech did
resemble Franconia. A small town—lots of old houses. A little local library. (I
knew I would be in there a lot.) An
old brick schoolhouse with a sign out front: Marguerite Middle School.[iv]
It looked like an old factory from the nineteenth century. I would learn there
was a new high school, on the other side of town. The middle school got the old
building. Figures. Kids are crazy at that age, so why give them a decent place
to spend their days? They don’t really, you know, deserve it. So went the “thinking” of the school board, I would
guess.
The house, as Father had told me, really was
a bit like our old one—as if home-builders in the nineteenth century had one
pretty basic idea—then reproduced it all over the place. Brick. Big front porch
that swooped around two sides (added later, I learned). Two stories. So many
rooms we didn’t know what to do with them all. Wet basement. (My lab would not
be there, I knew.) Hot, dry attic—and
that would become my lab. It was accessible
only via a pull-down set of stairs. I kind of liked that. And father helped me
install a window air-conditioner up there, so it was tolerable, even
comfortable, in the heat that remained in the Ohio air those late summer weeks.
We took a few days to move in, then Father
said it was time.
“Time?” I asked.
“To start back to school.”
I sighed—maybe groaned a little.
“I guess,” I confessed.
Father tried a joke. “It is illegal, you know, to stay home from
school … we don’t want the local constabulary rolling up here and taking us
away in handcuffs, do we?”
“No.” I smiled—but was thinking that
actually might be fun—and a jail was probably preferable to the middle school.
A classroom, to me, had become just another version of a cell.
***
Monday, October 7, 1996, was my first day
at the new school. Over the years I had learned to become invisible at school.
Oh, not actually invisible, of
course. But I had a couple of things going for me, and most important,
probably, was this: I still looked like an elementary school girl—not a young
woman. So … the boys ignored me, and none of the girls felt … threatened … by
me. I would not be taking anyone’s boyfriend away! And that meant there was no
point sending any jealous energy my way.
I’d
also learned how to spend my days so that kids—even adults—would never really
notice me. Not after a while. And once that brief “while” had passed, I could
move through the halls, sit in classes, eat lunch—and no one was really paying
attention to me. I never raised my hand, never asked another student a
question, never sat with anyone else in the library—or at lunch. And pretty
soon, as I said, everyone pretty much left me alone.
Except Mr. W.[v]
***
Mr. W. was the eighth grade English
teacher—one of the few in this small school. He was an older man, nearing
retirement (as I soon learned), and he was doing something that I thought only
younger teachers did: teaching us about something he didn’t really know all
that much about. In this case, it was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Of course, the other kids couldn’t tell
that he was improvising most of the time—“winging it.” But I could.[vi]
I kind of liked Mr. W. (he was one of the few people at the school who actually
seemed to notice me), so I started leaving him little notes—trying to be
kind—about the things he had gotten wrong in class. He started looking at me
with increased curiosity, and I knew I’d better be careful. I did not want to
become a “presence” at this school.
***
I remained in touch—a little bit, anyway—with my best friend from Franconia, Harriet Eastbrook. Both her mom and my dad had installed America On-Line on their home computers, so Harriet and I would exchange email now and then. They usually didn’t say much.
Vickie,
Miss you! Are you okay? I’m going to try
for cheerleader again. Should make it. What are you doing?
Harriet
***
Harriet,
I’m glad to hear you’re okay. I’m okay,
too, I guess, though you know how much I miss you—how much I grieve about Gil.
I’m pretty sure I loved him, Harriet. And now I’ll never see him again.
Good luck with your tryout.
Vickie
And that was about the extent of it.
Oh—and I should tell you. I’ve sort of “corrected” Harriet’s writing. I mean,
she was really careless about it. Didn’t capitalize things. Used abbreviations
that it took me awhile to figure out. It wasn’t until later that I learned
that what she was doing was common on email. Vickie was not being weird; I was.
***
Father and Mrs. Eastbrook remained close,
I guess. Once, both Harriet and I had thought that they would move in with each
other. And we both thought that was a great
idea—for them, for us.
True, she was still officially married to
Dr. Eastbrook, but he was no longer in their family picture—not at all. After
all, he’d tried to kill Harriet and me back on that Lake Erie island, and I had
seen him at Niagara Falls when Gil …
No, I can’t write about that— can’t think about that. If I let Gil linger in
my head—in my memory, in my imagination—the rest of the world goes away. Shuts
down. And I mourn until something in my life shocks me awake—like Father coming
into my room. Like having to get up in the morning and return to Marguerite
Middle School.
***
Father’s new “job” as a freelance online
journalist was going well—practically from the very start of our arrival in Wisbech. He could write well—could write quickly—and soon he was selling his
pieces all over the World Wide Web.
He wrote mostly about personal, about human, things—not about politics or
religion or all of those other things that divide people. So Father would write
stories about a small local library, struggling to survive—about a woman who
worked at a local restaurant and gave all of her tip money to help local kids
buy school lunches—about a man who set aside part of his farm to restore pets
that had been abandoned or abused by their owners—about why certain streets had
the names they did—about … you get the idea? He was loving his new life—doing
what he wanted, writing about what he wanted, spending time with me … I was
lucky.
***
And then something changed at school.
Something that … complicated … my life.
[i] There is no
Wisbech, Ohio. But there is a town by that name in England; it was the
birthplace of William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, in 1756. It’s about 100
miles north of London; the population today is a little over 31,000.
[ii] Vickie discusses
this space quite a bit in the previous two volumes of her Papers.
[iii] I checked this:
It’s true.
[iv] Marguerite is the
name of the beloved wife in St Leon,
a 1799 novel by Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin. Marguerite dies in the
novel, breaking the heart of St Leon. Needless to say, because there is no town
named Wisbech in Ohio, there also is no Marguerite Middle School.
[v] Vickie, of
course, is referring to me here, Mr. Walton. I’m not sure why she didn’t use my
full name, but I’m leaving this exactly as she wrote it.
[vi] The earlier
collections of Vickie’s Papers
explain her obsessions with Mary Shelley, with Frankenstein.
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