The Loud Silence of Francine Green (8 page)

Our floats arrived, and we slurped in unison for a minute. "Hey," Margie said, "what if we have the party at your house?"

My house? I'd had birthday parties when I was little, but the girls had never come over for a slumber party before. I suppose that's because I'd never asked them. I never thought they'd want to come. "Really? Sure," I said. "I'll ask."

"Neat," said Margie.

"Swell," said Gert.

"Super," they said together.

I ran to Sophie's. She was finally off house arrest, thank goodness. I had to tell her about the party
right away.
It would be so great. We would dance and tell jokes and eat too much. The other girls would get to know Sophie, how much fun she could be when she wasn't trying to bother Sister or save the world from fascism. This
would
be super.

"Soph," I shouted, banging on the door until it opened. "Soph!"

"What is it?" she asked. "Is Montgomery Clift in town again?"

"Listen to this," I said, following her inside. "We're going to have a slumber party over Christmas vacation. I have to ask my parents, but I'm sure it'll be okay."

"What?"

"A slumber party. You know, where friends sleep over and make fudge and paint each other's toenails and dance."

"I hate fudge, I don't know how to dance, and my only friend is you. I won't come." She marched into her room with me on her heels.

"Come on. It'll be fun. Gert and Margie will be there, of course, and we'll invite Mary Virginia, Florence, and Susan."

"No, thanks."

I flopped onto her bed. "Why not?"

"Because they're your friends, not mine."

"They'd be your friends if you got to know them and let them get to know you."

Sophie grimaced at herself in the mirror. "They know me all right, and I know them, and we'll never be friends. Go have your silly party without me."

"Come on, Sophie, I wouldn't do that. We're best friends, but you could at least try to be friends with them, too. And you don't hate fudge."

"I would if Gert made it." Sophie brightened. "Hey, maybe we could have our own slumber party, just us. We could drink root beer and read movie magazines and gossip about the other girls."

"That's what we do all the time. I wanted this to be special, to do slumber party things." I could feel the excitement
draining out of me like air out of a leaky old balloon. Why did Sophie have to be so stubborn?

Could I have the party without her? Would that really be all right? I looked over at her and she looked right back at me, pushing her hair back behind her ears. I couldn't desert her for Gert Miller. "I suppose we could have a party by ourselves," I said. "Gee, I can't wait to tell Margie and Gert that I'm having the slumber party but they can't come. That
will
be a fun conversation." I sat up on my heels. "If I agree to do it your way,
you
have to agree to do some special slumber party things. Like dance."

"I told you, I don't know how to dance," Sophie said, sitting on her desk.

"Of course you do. Everyone dances. You just move your feet, swing your hips, snap your fingers. Wait, I'll show you." I had never danced with an actual boy, but I cut a mean rug in front of the mirror in the bathroom.

I jumped up and switched on Sophie's radio. "Oh, goodie, it's 'Tiger Rag.'" The Mills Brothers crooned and tooted and thumped, "Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger! Hold that tiger!"

"Feel it, Sophie," I shouted over the music. "Here." I touched my ears. "And then here," I said, pointing to my stomach. "And then here, in your feet. And you're dancing."

"Francine, do you know how silly you look?"

"I do not. I'm jitterbugging. I'm supposed to look like this." I grabbed Sophie's hand. "Come on, let's boogie-woogie."

Sophie resisted as I tried to pull her up. "Let go. I don't
want to do this. I don't want to feel things in my stomach and my feet. Let go!" She jerked away and sat back on her desk.

"Sophie Bowman, sometimes I don't get you at all. Won't you even try?"

"Dancing is so ordinary.
Everybody
does it.
All girls
dance. I'm not ordinary, I'm not all girls, and I don't want to be."

"You could dance in an unordinary, spectacularly individual way. Come on and try."

I pulled her up and she moved around a little, her feet turning this way and that, her arms flailing as if she were chasing bees away. "Well, it's not pretty, but I think it's dancing," I told her.

She stopped. "That's enough," she said as she flopped onto her bed.

"I'm sorry I said that, Soph. You weren't doing so badly."

"I am not about to wiggle around and have people laugh at me. If I can't do it right, I just won't do it."

"What? The brave and fearless Sophie? Come on, take a chance." Holy cow, here I was telling Sophie to try to risk a little, instead of the other way around. What a surprise.

"Listen, Soph, you won," I said. "We're not having the slumber party. But we
are
going to get you dancing. Now get off that bed and do what I do."

We stumbled around for a while to the music, and I think maybe Sophie enjoyed it a tiny bit although she said it was just plain hard work. "I have to stop now," I finally said. "My mother is waiting for her aspirin, and besides, my stomach hurts."

I started home at a run, but my insides kept cramping up. Food poisoning, I thought. Or more likely too many root beer floats.

But it wasn't. Changing for bed that night, I discovered why my belly hurt and my blouses were too tight. I had gotten what my mother called "your monthly visitor" and Dolores called "the curse." It must have been all the bouncing around at Sophie's.

My mother gave me a box of sanitary napkins, an elastic belt, and a booklet called "So You're a Woman Now" from the people who made Kotex. She brought me a cup of milky tea and stroked my hair. "You're getting so grown up," she said. "My little girl."

I sipped my tea and thought. I had always thought that growing up, like dying, was something that happened to other people. Not me. Yet here I was.

Getting my period seemed so final. It wasn't like hopscotch, where if you messed up, you could start again. Yesterday I was a kid, and today God poked me in the stomach and said, "You're grown up now, Francine. What are you going to do about it?" There was no going back.

After everyone was in bed, I called Sophie. "Soph," I whispered, "guess what! I'm bleeding. I got my period."

"Oh, ick. Poor you."

"I don't mind. It just means that I'm growing up. Dolores seems to handle it without too many problems." I looked down at my chest. "And it does mean cleavage, you know."

"Well, I'm never going to get my period."

"Sophie Bowman, for such a smart person, you're dumb sometimes."

"Who cares?" she said.

"Good night, Sophie."

"Good night, Francine."

From way down the street
Sophie and I could hear his voice, roaring and thundering like the sea. "How can you say Irv Noren is a better hitter than Frank Kelleher? What a lot of hooey. That Kelleher, he's such a slugger, he has muscles in his
hair.
" The voice stopped roaring—to give someone else a chance to talk, I supposed—and then resumed. "Harry, my friend," it said, "you know baseball like you know cooking."

"That's Jacob Mandelbaum," Sophie said as we walked up the path to her porch, where Mr. Bowman and another man were sitting on lawn chairs.

"I didn't know your father liked baseball. I thought he was more of a serious opera kind of guy."

"He doesn't, but he likes Jacob Mandelbaum."

"Jacob," Mr. Bowman was saying as we climbed the stairs, "others obviously agree with me. Irv Noren was voted MVP of the Pacific Coast League for 1949. Most Valuable Player."

A man who looked like everybody's grandfather took a big cigar out of his mouth and said, "Feh, by me MVP means Most Visible
Punim
—a pretty boy who gets his picture in the papers. If you said Ozark Ike Zernial, maybe. That boy tore up the field. But I still think Frankie Kelleher, a California boy like me, is—"

"Mr. M, you're not from California," Sophie said, kissing him on the cheek. "This is my friend, Francine Green. Francine, meet Jacob Mandelbaum."

Mr. Mandelbaum stood up and bowed to me. "Sophie, darling, how did you do it, find the one girl in the whole world as beautiful as you?"

I blushed and sat on the porch railing. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Mandelbaum," I said.

He winked at me and sat down again. "Of course I'm a California boy, Sophie, my darling," he said. "Look at my driver's license: 445 Maple Avenue, Los Angeles 36, California. The great state of California says I'm a California boy. I am also a proud U.S. citizen, obey the law, pay my taxes, and fly the flag on the Fourth of July. A real Yankee Doodle and a California boy, that's me." He leaned back, and smoke swirled about his head.

"Mr. Mandelbaum is an actor," Sophie said to me. "In the movies. His movie-star name is Jack Mann."

A movie star? He didn't seem like a movie star, with his thin gray hair, sad brown eyes, and funny foreign talk, but my heart started to pound anyway. Did he, I wondered, know Montgomery Clift?

"Jack Mann. Feh. Mandelbaum, it means almond tree.
What does Mann mean?
Bubkes,
nothing." He leaned forward. "They say my real name is too foreign. Too Jewish, they think but don't say"

I cleared my throat. "I myself like
Mandelbaum
better," I said. "It sounds like part of a poem. But I suppose
Mann
is a better name for a movie star."

"Movie star, no. No kind of star. A character actor," he said, blowing smoke into the air. "That means small parts, tiny parts sometimes, but not even them much right now. The FBI doesn't like my causes or my friends, and my studio dances when the FBI plays the fiddle."

The FBI playing the fiddle? What was he talking about? I thought the FBI arrested bad guys and kept us safe.

"All the studios are cooperating with the FBI, Jacob," said Mr. Bowman. "And as to your causes and your friends, why, it's a bad time to support the communists. We keep hearing about Stalin's atrocities—"

"Joe Stalin, sure, he's a monster, with his labor camps and murder squads, but the communists don't have it
all
wrong. People are important, communism says, not property. People, peace, brotherhood, civil rights: When did these become dirty words? Communist words?" Mr. Mandelbaum stood up and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up like beach grass. "I've had it good in this country, Harry, and I want that for every person—enough to eat, a job, the freedom to speak, to work, to protest, to—" He stopped. "Bah. Actors. You give us a line and we make a speech. I apologize." He bowed slightly and sat down again.

I'd heard of Stalin, the evil communist dictator, but labor
camps and murder squads sounded awful. Communists must be worse than I thought, and here Jacob Mandelbaum was defending them. I'd never heard anyone have a good word for communists except Sophie, and I figured that was just Sophie being Sophie. Now there was Mr. Mandelbaum. I chewed on my lip and studied him. He didn't seem deluded or evil or stupid.

We were all quiet for a minute. Finally Sophie cleared her throat and said, "Francine knows all about actors and movies and movie stars, don't you, Francine?" She nudged me.

"Not
everything,
" I said softly.

Mr. Mandelbaum stared at me solemnly, smoke circling his head. "You maybe want to act, Francine?" he asked.

"No, she's too chicken," said Sophie. "She wouldn't like everybody looking at her."

What did Sophie know? I looked down at my lap, embarrassed.

"Acting, you know, is like baseball," Mr. Mandelbaum said, puffing on his cigar. "Listen and I'll tell you."

Mr. Bowman laughed and said, "This sounds like a two-beer story, Jacob. Wait a minute and I'll get us another one."

Mr. Mandelbaum took a long drink of the new beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "So," he said, "once Lefty Gomez—I think it was Lefty Gomez. Or Dizzy Dean. No, Lefty Gomez. So anyway, in this one game he was pitching, the right fielder—was it Butch Moran? No. Never mind—the right fielder was a bum. Couldn't catch the ball to save his soul. Every time a hitter hit to right field, this fielder
would miss the ball, it would hit the fence and bounce off, and by the time he chased it down and threw to second base, a single had become a double, a double had become a triple. It happened one, twice, three times.

"The other team catches on. They start hitting every ball to right field and scoring runs off the fielder's mistakes, and still he can't catch the ball. Finally, Lefty, he gives the right fielder such a frown, like he's daring the guy to miss again." Mr. Mandelbaum leaped up. He twisted his face into the grouchiest of frowns and started twirling his arm like a windmill. "Lefty winds up and pitches. The batter swings. The ball flies into right field, goes right through the fielder's hands, and bounces off the fence. By the time he grabs it and throws it to third, another run scores.

"The ball comes back to Lefty. He's so angry, steam is coming out of his ears. He turns and stares at the right fielder. But the right fielder, his back is to Lefty. He's looking at the fence, examining it, like there's something wrong with the fence and that's the problem. Lefty, he's so mad, he winds up and throws the ball, not to the batter, but right at the Joe Knucklehead in right field. The throw is high, it hits the fence, just in front of the guy. The fielder, still staring at the fence, thinks it's a hit. This time he grabs it, spins, and sends a perfect throw to second base!" Mr. Mandelbaum grabbed at the air, spun, and mimicked a perfect throw. "Of course, there's no runner there. No runner anywhere. Everyone's laughing at the schmo in right field, and Lefty looks like he'll explode." He laughed until his cheeks were wet with tears. "No runner. What a schmo! True story."

We applauded noisily. Mr. Mandelbaum bowed to us, sat down, and puffed again on the awful black cigar.