Not the End of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

school and I couldn’t think of anyone and when Mr. Blake said, “Maggie! Who is your hero?” Julius Caesar was just the first person who popped into my head. “He had fits,” I told Mother. “He was an epileptic and still he was able to be an emperor.”
    “You’re not epileptic, thank God,” she said. “What does that have to do with you?”
    “Nothing,” I said and she said she thought I chose him to spite her, just because she wouldn’t let me see “that godawful movie.”
    “It is not,” I said and that was the truth. I’d already seen it; Ginger Moore and I sneaked in through the exit door at the Ottawa Theater and watched almost the whole thing and I didn’t see what was so awful about it except Liz Taylor wore see-through togas.
    Daddy thought it was funny. He talked about having been to the Coliseum and Ruthie kept interrupting to tell us her hero was Beep-Beep, the cartoon road runner. Donald said his hero was Al Kaline and Mother wanted to know why I couldn’t have chosen Amelia Earhart; Amelia Earhart would have been a good hero for me.
    “But she’s dead!” I cried.
    “So is Julius Caesar,” she said.
    “Yeah, but he didn’t just disappear,” I said, starting to feel all panicky and tight, as if I might burst into tears and I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t cry in front of her, I couldn’t let her know she’d got to me. “He didn’t get in his plane and crash and disappear!”
    “That’s true,” Mother said, poking the ends of her corn cob with the little plastic holders. “His friends murdered him.”
    I was outraged. She wanted me to disappear. She wanted me to get in a plane and fly off and never return. She could put a picture of me up on the mantel and point to it when the Bridge Ladies came over. “And that,” she could say, sobbing ever so lightly, “was Maggie. She went on an adventure and never came back.”
    It was what I’d always suspected, but I didn’t expect her to be so blatant about it. Didn’t she just say she thought I should choose someone I wanted to be? A zillion heroes inthe world from which to pick and my own mother wants me to pick the one who plops in the ocean and is never heard from again.
    Ruthie started crying; she thought someone was going to kill me. “Maggie’s gonna be murdered in an airplane!” she blubbered. “Who will be my sister?”
    “Now look what you’ve done,” Mother said and I couldn’t believe it.
    “Me!? All I said was I chose Julius Caesar as my subject for a stupid paper for stupid summer school. You’re the one who brought up Amelia Earhart!”
    “And you’re the one who brought up plane crashes!”
    Donald started giggling and Ruthie began to flap her arms and Mother started to cry. “I can’t do anything right!” she sniffled, tossing her corn on the plate and sending the butter splattering. “I can’t say anything around here!”
    Daddy thumped the table and said, “All right, all right, let’s stop this caterwauling and eat.”
    I couldn’t believe she was being so obvious about it, right in front of Daddy. And what was he doing, sitting there grinning and bemused, as if he didn’t notice? She’d always wanted me to disappear-from the moment I was born, she wanted to be rid of me and I wasn’t just making it up, I knew it. I even heard her once, talking to Mrs. Tucker on the phone and crying because she couldn’t “control” me and she admitted it, kind of. She was talking about Grandmother, and how Grandmother used to come over and tell her what a lousy mother she was and what a lousy housekeeper she was. “I wanted to prove to her that I could be a good mother,” Mother told Mrs. Tucker. “I wanted to prove to her that I wasn’t like her.” I felt sorry for her when she said that and I almost ran into the room to jump on her lap and hug her, but then her voice got all hard and nasty and she said, “But thatchild was uncontrollable from the day she was born. It was almost as if she was