The Long Journey Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

tapping at the typewriter keys.
    I tightened the afghan around my shoulders. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote on the first line in my best penmanship. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote again. My breathing relaxed. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote again, and no longer felt cold. “I love you Miss Brown,” I wrote until I reached the bottom of the page, then turned the paper over and continued writing the same words until the paper was filled. I imagined so hard that it was almost as if I were there, in the principal’s office, hugging them both and being hugged back. I felt like we were in a circle of love, complete and safe.
    “Margaret, you can set the table now.”
    Mother’s words shattered my bliss. My face flushed with shame. I wasn’t certain why, but I knew that if Mother read what I’d written, my words would upset her. “Just a minute, Mother.”
    I ripped the paper out of my book, crushed it, and threw it into the fire.
    I went to the dining room, lifted the heavy plates from the china cabinet, and set them at their places on the special white linen tablecloth. Then I put the silver beside each plate. The handles of the sterlingsilverware were covered with tiny flowers of all sorts like miniature gardens.
    I loved the table setting and the story of how Daddy had seen a dining table all set up in a window at Rich’s. He’d liked it so much he’d just marched into the store and bought everything—tablecloth, napkins, plates, bowls, cups and saucers, salad and dessert plates, serving bowls, silver, and glasses—just as he’d seen it in the department store’s window. He brought the whole thing home to Mother. From that time on, this replica of Rich’s window was on our dining table every Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter, and every other special-occasion dinner.
    Mother brought the turkey in and set it on the table, its plump thighs high in the air, breast browned with butter, juices leaking out through the holes where she’d punctured the skin to test its doneness. The turkey, as always, lay on the enormous ironstone platter that had belonged to Daddy’s mother, and had held all the Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys of my childhood. The platter had a long, dark crack down its middle, a flaw like the flaw I felt in myself.
V
    I don’t know what ruined me. I thought about it as I walked home from fourth grade alone. I thought about it on my way to school as I walked past the sandspur patch where Marty the bully crouched, waiting to fling sandspurs at me. Sometimes they left bloody scratches on my legs. Sometimes they buried their sharp points in my socks and hems. It hurt my fingers to pull them out.
    I walked, thinking about how I had to hide my flaws from Mother. She’d go crazy if she found out about them. Mother always talked about going crazy, going to pieces. “Just to pieces,” she would scream, hitting her head with her fists.
    I thought about how ruined I was as I walked past Uncle Frank’shouse. Sometimes he forced me to stand on the sofa in his sunroom and rub his bald head. “If you stop, wild horses in the basement will trample you,” he threatened. I thought the sound of the wild horses was really the sound of the fire rumbling in the furnace. But what if I was wrong, what if it was really the hooves of horses, restless and wild to escape? I hated rubbing Uncle Frank’s head. Aunt Mary was never around when he asked me to do this. She was in the kitchen, cooking, or down at the creek, fishing. Aunt Mary loved to fish.
    Sometimes Uncle Frank asked me to spend the night at his house. He always let me sleep in his daughter Roberta’s room. It was all plush and satin, lavender, white, and purple. Even the toilet, tub, and washbasin in her bathroom were lavender. She was married and gone now. Daddy told me that Uncle Frank was terribly upset that Roberta had married a man almost as old as Uncle Frank himself. Daddy said the man owned a nightclub, someplace in Florida. Now