Nancy Springer - Number 20.pdf

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#20
by Nancy Springer
* * * *
There’s a big lilac bush growing by Mrs. Life’s porch, and I used to hide in the
hollow under the green leaves next to the cinderblock to play that I was Pony Queen
Of The Universe or just to get away from the neighborhood awhile. But I don’t go
there anymore, because I’m going to die, and what I heard there is what made me
understand how that’s going to happen.
Not that old Mrs. Life was not a nice lady. She sat on her porch all day every
day from April to October and spoke to me like I was a friend every time I passed.
“Veronica” she called me, be-cause she said “Ronni” was a boy’s name. It was
pretty much the only way she didn’t approve of me. Most people that old don’t
seem to like kids much, but Mrs. Life would invite me up on her porch to sit by her
and talk to her and see what she was doing. Sometimes it was crocheting an afghan,
and she would say to me, “I’ve put in a hundred and ten hours on this one so far.”
She would say, “I’ve crocheted sixty-six afghans since 1983.” And she would show
me her notebook. She had a little lined spiral-bound notebook like they sell in
drugstores, and she had marked in it everything she had crocheted since she learned
how to crochet, and how many ounces of yarn each thing took, and how much the
yarn cost, and how many hours it took her to make it, and who she gave it to when
she was done.
Or sometimes she was reading a book, one of those real fat paperbacks about
the Civil War or something, and she would say to me, “I’m on page six hundred and
forty-seven.” She would say, “I read twenty-two books last year.” And she had a
notebook for keeping track of that, too. She had been a school-teacher way back
when my mom and dad were in school, so maybe that was why she had those
notebooks and kept track of everything in very very tidy thin handwriting. Her
handwriting made me shiver like having a fishhook caught in me.
She lived right in the middle of town, next to the church, across from the
tav-ern. From up on her porch a person could see practically the whole town,
because Pleasantville isn’t very big. You could see all the important places, anyway:
the Post Office, and the school-yard, and the drugstore, and the house next to the
tavern that my folks called the cathouse, though I never could fig-ure out why. They
don’t have any cats over there that I know of. Sometimes I hung around in the alley
behind the cathouse watching the windows and stuff, because I like cats, kittens
espe-cially. There’s different girls and ladies who live there, and I never saw any cats
but I did see interesting things hap-pening, things to give me ideas what it might be
like when I was a woman. I guess that’s why I kept going back.
Anyway, everybody in Pleasantville went past Mrs. Life’s porch to get to
those places, and they all knew her, and most of them had had her as a teacher in
 
school. And they all liked her, or at least seemed to. They all stopped to talk with her
or at least said hi. So I knew she must be a nice lady.
Sometimes I didn’t want to talk with her, though. Sometimes I just didn’t want
to be bothered with anybody, I didn’t feel like part of my family at all, I wondered if
maybe I was adopted or something, and that was when I would hide under the lilac
bush beside her porch and play that I was Chinese Jumprope Master Of The Galaxy,
and that was how it happened that I heard her arguing with Mr. Quickel.
It was pretty early in spring yet, and the blossoms were still on the lilac, and it
smelled sweeter than a Church La-dies’ Auxiliary under there, so I stayed longer than
usual. I almost fell asleep. At least I think that was the day it was. It makes sense that
it was, because lilac time is when people start mowing their lawns, and she was
arguing with Mr. Quickel about what he was going to charge her to do hers again this
year.
“Thirty dollars a week,” he said. “Now you know that includes every-thing.”
She had a big lawn with lots of shrubs and things in it that had to be kept after.
“Why thirty? Last year you charged me fifteen.”
“No, last year I charged you twenty-five. But the cost of everything has gone
up, gasoline for the mower —”
“Last year you charged me fifteen.”
Mr. Quickel was one of those people who had had Mrs. Life in school, and
now he was a schoolteacher himself. My big brother, Greg, had him for Health and
wrestling in middle school, and after going to a few wrestling matches I kind of got a
crush on Coach Quickel because he was really good-looking for an old guy. Besides
which he went to our church and everybody liked him. He mowed grass in the
summertime because, my mom said, the school board didn’t pay him enough. My
mom said it was a disgrace to see a schoolteacher moonlighting. I had heard Greg
and a couple of his friends talking about mooning a tour bus one night, and I
wondered if it meant the same thing.
Mrs. Life said, “The cost of gas hasn’t gone up that much. You want to
charge me double what you did last year?”
“Now I know you’re getting up there, Mrs. Life.” Mr. Quickel tried to make a
joke of it and put on a sort of teacher tone, like to a kid who was being dense. “You
think back, you’ll remember I charged you twenty-five last year. Not that I blame
you for forgetting. The years do have a way of piling up, don’t they? You must be
pushing eighty. Are you getting a little short-minded, maybe?”
“Nicholas Quickel.” Mrs. Life’s voice instead of yelling went low and cold,
 
and I knew Mr. Quickel had made a mistake. A bad one. He knew it too, because he
said, “I didn’t mean any-thing, Mrs. Life.” I also noticed that even though he had
gray hair himself Mr. Quickel still called her Mrs. Life instead of Savilla the way
some of the really old people did. “I just thought . . . my tax records show . . . never
mind. Look, I guess I can still do your lawn for twenty-five. . . .”
Mrs. Life said, “I will get someone else,” and I heard him walk away.
He should have known better than to think Mrs. Life was short-minded, the
way she kept track of everything. I guess if she put a nickel in a Salvation Army
kettle she went home and marked it down. All year long she kept track of her
grocery coupons in a little note-book and every December 31 she knew how much
she had saved. My mom said coupons and afghans and books and stuff weren’t the
only things she kept track of. Every time my big sister, Re-gina, was out on a date,
Mom said, old Mrs. Life was watching to see how late she came in. I guess she
counted how many times Regina kissed each boy. She stood back to watch, but
Mom could see her shadow on the window.
That same night she argued with Mr. Quickel, Mrs. Life called and got my
brother Greg to mow her lawn for ten dollars a week, and the first time he did it he
made me come along and help rake, because I told him after he hung up the phone
that he could have got fifteen. Mrs. Life watched him hard at first to make sure he
mowed in nice neat lines, but after a while she went back to sit on her porch.
Another old lady, Mrs. Simmermeyer, came by and stopped to talk, and I was raking
the side yard so I heard them. They started with the preacher (they didn’t like that he
wore gray slacks instead of black) and practically went through the town person by
person.
“I was just thinking last night about somebody I haven’t thought of in years,”
Mrs. Life said after a while.
“Oh?” The other lady was happy to hear this. “Who might that be?”
him?”
“The Klunk boy. You remember little Charlie Klunk? What ever became of
“Didn’t you hear?” Mrs. Simmer-meyer was in heaven. “He came home on
early discharge from the Service, remember, and then he moved to Cal-ifornia. And
the Klunks all said he had married a nice girl and had two nice youngsters. But then
along about 1973 — I think it was ‘73 — maybe it was ‘72 —”
Mrs. Life would’ve known whether it was ‘73 or ‘72. She knew what year
peo-ple were born or graduated or married or died. Anyway, I knew she knew what
year Charlie Klunk did what he did because I had heard her tell this same whole story
to somebody else the sum-mer before. But here she was sitting and listening to Mrs.
Simmermeyer tell it and not even correcting her.
 
Mrs. Simmermeyer got back on track. “Anyway, he went and joined one of
them Gay Liberation clubs. Came out of the closet. Here he was light in his loafers
all along and none of us knew it.”
“I knew it,” Mrs. Life said, real calm. “I could tell he was a sissy. I had him in
school, remember? And I could al-ways tell which boys to watch. But what’s he
doing now?”
“He lives with his sweetie. You know, his boyfriend. They run a flower shop
together.” Mrs. Simmermeyer laughed, but Mrs. Life just sort of nodded.
“He and Nicholas Quickel were in the same class, weren’t they? And didn’t
they used to run around together a lot?”
“Did they? I don’t remember.”
“Well, I had them both in class, and it seems to me they were very close.”
I turned around and raked the other way so I could watch. There they sat with
their heads together, their saggy old bosoms almost touching, and Mrs.
Simmermeyer’s baggy old eyes had opened wide. But Mrs. Life just said as if it was
the weather she was talking about, “Nick Quickel was over here yes-terday evening,
was what made me think of Charlie Klunk. I wonder if they still keep in touch.”
“Nicky Quickel. Isn’t he the wres-tling coach now?”
“Yes. Junior High. Last I heard.”
They talked some more, and then Mrs. Simmermeyer went off about her
business. Mrs. Life sat rocking on her porch in her wicker rocker, and after I had
raked as much as I could for a while I went up and sat with her. I was kind of hoping
she would have some sort of chore for me, because Greg wasn’t giving me anything
for raking grass except just letting me live. Some-times Mrs. Life sent me across to
the Post Office with a letter or across to the drugstore to buy her a magazine, and
even if it was just a dinky little errand she always paid me at least a quarter. Like I
said, she was a real nice lady.
But she didn’t send me on any errand that day. We just watched the cars and
stuff go by. When a tour bus went by Mrs. Life said, “That’s the sixth one to-day.”
The reason the tour buses go by is that we sit along the river halfway be-tween
the Indian Rock Carvings up-stream and the Indian Echoes Cavern downstream.
And right outside town is the Indian Maiden’s Leap. There’s this high cliff above the
river, and some In-dian girl whose loverboy got axed was supposed to have killed
herself by jumping off it. The thing they don’t tell the tourists is that people still kill
 
themselves by jumping off there. Our town is supposed to have the highest suicide
rate practically in the whole country, and nobody could figure out why. It was in the
paper last year, and my mom and dad talked about it for a week, how so many
people in Pleas-antville killed themselves when it was supposed to be a nice place to
live, no drugs, old-fashioned values, all that. Of course not all the people who killed
themselves took the Leap. Some of them took pills or shot themselves or whatever.
My one girlfriend’s grandpap killed himself with a hunting rifle last winter and he
blew his head apart so good nobody could go in the room af-terward. They had to
pay a cleaning service eight hundred dollars to get rid of the mess, all the little bits of
ear and nose and eyeballs and stuff. You would think he could have at least done it
out-side the house.
“Those tour buses smell terrible, don’t they?” Mrs. Life said to me.
I went back to raking, and more peo-ple stopped and talked with Mrs. Life,
and maybe she said something to them about how Charlie Klunk and Nicky Quickel
used to be real close, but I don’t know. It’s not like I listened to every-thing she said
to everybody. I mean, as much as I could I did, because I learned a lot that way,
about different people and about what it’s like to be grown up. But that day I sort of
felt like I’d already heard enough.
About a week later Mr. Quickel came by one evening. We were all sitting out
on the lawn, out in the dusk watching the lightning bugs, and he came and sat with
us. He and Mom and Dad were kind of friends back even before Greg started
wrestling for him, because of church. After a while Dad gave me a dollar and sent
me across the street to the drugstore to get myself a candy bar, because I guess he
could tell Mr. Quickel had something on his mind he didn’t want to talk about in
front of me. So after I came back with my Snickers I went up to my room. But my
windows were open and I still heard them down below. Something about rumors all
over town.
“You can’t fight gossip,” my Mom was saying. “Pay any attention to it and it
just makes it worse. All you can do is ignore it.”
“Talk about getting screwed from be-hind,” Mr. Quickel said like he was
trying hard to make a joke, and they all laughed a little.
By the time school was out even us kids had heard some things. Mr. Quickel
was gay. Everybody said it, so it had to be true. People whose boys had had Mr.
Quickel as a coach were worried. I no-ticed my parents took Greg off one eve-ning
and asked him some questions. Everybody knew gay people shouldn’t be trusted
around children.
“But he has a wife. Grown children,” a woman said to Mrs. Life over the
porch railing. I was under the lilac bush, playing Princess of California. I had been
spending a lot of time under there lately. The real world had started to seem more
 

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